Abstract
A negative ethos is likely to develop among teachers when educational policies, even unintentionally, denigrate the work of teachers and castigate the public schools in which they work. In recent decades, in the USA, the negativism associated with public schooling is spread by social and political forces, particularly through modern media, unencumbered by facts. The proximal cause of this is a test-oriented culture, where media spread the word that simple numbers can stand in for the complex human systems that characterize each classroom and school. An ethos of humanism has been challenged by the rise of norm-referenced accountability systems, insuring that some nations, some schools-within-nations, and some teachers must lose. Such is the nature of norm-referenced accountability systems. Under these stressful conditions, educators frequently make decisions about students and curriculum that reflect compromised ethics, if not a more general loss of their humanity. Their professional lives, then, are too frequently dominated by a negative ethos.
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Berliner, D.C. (2021). Development of a Negative Ethos by Educators in an Age Overly Reverential of Quantification. In: Oser, F., Heinrichs, K., Bauer, J., Lovat, T. (eds) The International Handbook of Teacher Ethos. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73644-6_6
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