I make my living by substitute teaching right now, as well as running creative writing workshops for K-12 students in the state in which I live (I'm in the midw

I make my living by substitute teaching right now, as well as running creative writing workshops for K-12 students in the state in which I live (I'm in the midwest). In the last calendar year, I've been roughly 25 different schools. In addition to this, I do research with a former professor of education, and maintain a pretty wide network of friends and professional contacts who are teachers. And, depending on the grade and on the school, it is like this. The professor whom I work with has this as one of her primary research areas, and has told me story after story of going into elementary schools (particularly on the western, less populated half of our state) in which teacher-student interactions are scripted down to the minute, and teachers are evaluated based on whether or not they follow the script. The major high school across the street from where I live (~1500 students) has a science department where none of the teachers have written their own lesson plans in about 3 years; they use the lesson plans in the district binder (I've taught from those lesson plans; they're barely rigorous, and conflate superficial knowledge memorization with actual learning). A friend of mine is a language and communication arts teacher in a middle school; if he wants to deviate from the lesson plan binder, he has to submit a proposal for the new unit (there can't just be one lesson) during the summer, at which point it's at the mercy of the committee. While I was teaching in Kansas, my lesson plans were written for me, and I was punished any time I went away from them, even when it was clear that my students needed more time with something before they understood it ("If you were a good teacher, and if they were paying attention, they'd get it the first time. Make them come in during lunch."). There are plenty of holdouts, thankfully; schools which serve mostly affluent students (particularly schools with strong enough test results that they can get away with it) seem to have done well. Additionally, there are a lot of more urban schools which serve students who are not quite so affluent and which have managed to hold out, though I suspect some of this is an accident of the difficulties of administrating a big school in which math is the least of most students' worries.