John Thompson, teacher and historian, writes here about two examples of a disturbing trend. In the first one, a teacher writes about her abhorrence of data walls, which publicly shame children. The other is the current flap in Florida, where some districts are punishing children who do not take the state test, even though they are known to be good students whose work in class demonstrates their ability.
He writes:
Have They No Shame?
Virginia 3rd grade teacher, Launa Hall, exposes a shocking example of how corporate reform has lost its soul. In doing so, she reminds us of the way that bubble-in accountability started the nation’s schools down this abusive road. Hall writes, “Our ostensible goal in third grade was similar to what you’d hear in elementary schools everywhere: to educate the whole child, introduce them to a love of learning … But the hidden agenda was always prepping kids for the state’s tests.” When educators’ jobs shift from the unlocking of children’s whole potential to increasing test scores, some or many educators will stand and fight against destructive pedagogies, but it is amazing how many otherwise caring human beings will agree to inflict so much pain on children.
In Florida, for instance, most schools aren’t punishing 3rd graders for “opting out” of tests. Two districts, however, are warning parents that their children will be retained if they opt out. The Manatee district is “cherry-picking” from the state law in order to hold back a third-grader who “has gotten nothing but rave reviews from teachers.” Another parent opted her son out of the testing because of his test anxiety; “she said her son reads on a fourth-grade level and performs at or above grade level in the classroom.” These school systems are obviously willing to hurt those kids in order to send a message to parents who have the temerity to push back against the testing mania.
A few years ago, I thought I witnessed the ultimate abusive practice designed to shame children into working harder to meet higher quantitative targets. It was bad enough that the New Orleans “No Excuses” charter school I was visiting prohibited talking in the cafeteria during lunch. Even worse, their data wall was prominent in the lunchroom for everyone to see. I had once seen an Oklahoma City data wall, identifying the scores of all students, but it was in a room, inside another room, and it was for faculty eyes only. Teachers and administrators in OKC had long been warned that a NOLA-style breach of confidentially could cost us our teaching licenses, but that had seemed redundant. What sort of human being would publically reveal individual students’ attendance and/or classroom performance data?
And that brings us back to Launa Hall’s story. She notes that posting students’ names in such a way without parental consent may violate privacy laws. But, “At the time, neither I nor my colleagues at the school knew that, and … we were hardly alone.” Hall adds that the U.S. Education Department encourages teachers to not display the numbers for individuals, who are identifiable by name, and that approach would have been more “consistent with the letter, if not the intent, of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. But it would be every bit as dispiriting. My third-graders would have figured out in 30 seconds who was who, coded or not.”
Hall’s focus is not on the legal games adults are playing but on the damage done by this shaming to individual children. She paints us a picture of the pain that was inflicted on “Child X” when she saw her real name followed by “lots of red dots” declaring that she was not meeting official state standards. Of course, Hall “tried to mitigate the shame she felt.” The teacher’s efforts at reconnection may have helped a little, but the student “still had all those red dots for everyone to see.”
Hall then tells us “exactly who is being shamed by data walls.” Janie (her pseudonym for Child X) “is part of an ethnic minority group. She received free breakfast and lunch every school day last year, and some days that’s all she ate. Her family had no fixed address for much of the year, and Janie, age 8, frequently found herself the responsible caretaker of younger siblings.”
The Post story prompted around 400 comments and more discussion on social media. Almost all were opposed to the public posting of children’s data, often decrying the walls as insane and reprehensible. One commented, “Hard to imagine this actually occurring. Why not just put the dots on their foreheads?” Some commenters tried to blame the individual teachers who posted data walls, but others explained how that is often required by under-the-gun school systems.
Even so, the few supporters of such data walls, as well as the venom of some commentators casting blame on individuals, illustrate the tragedy unleashed by corporate reformers appealing to our basest instincts. A few recalled the good old days and complained “today’s little flowers can’t take competition or even comparisons of any kind,” or said that similar things happened 50 years ago, but “if some little snot bragged about getting the highest grade, he/she would get beat up after school.” One personified the market-driven mentality which gave us such brutality, saying that 3rd graders should be separated “into two tracks: one would be the “everyone gets a trophy track,” while “the other track would be the ‘competitive track,’ which would feature these dreaded ‘data walls,'” so we could see who became more successful in life.
Hall is magnanimous in wrapping up this sorry tale of cruel competition and compliance, “when policymakers mandate tests and buy endlessly looping practice exams to go with them, their image of education is from 30,000 feet. They see populations and sweeping strategies. From up there, it seems reasonable …” But, how could they disagree with her admonition? “Teaching the young wasn’t supposed to feel like this.”
I would only add that the ultimate tragedy would be the creation of a new generation of educators and patrons where this sort of shaming feels like teaching.
There is method to this madness. The corporate reform model does not envision “all children receiving a quality public education” They early on pick the chosen ones to receive a quality education that prepares the student to think critically in evaluating the world around them. The majority of the students do not fall in this chosen category, because they will not be needed in the future high tech economy. They are being programed to fail. The last thing the corporate interests want is millions of unemployed youth, who are able to think critically, questioning the status quo. What better way of reducing the numbers of youth, who are intellectually prepared to resist, than to disarm them at an early age. P.S. I saw this scenario being played out in Detroit with the children of my extended family.
I had never thought about it that way. Thank you for posting this.
I first saw a hall chart with NCLB test scores for each teacher, 2003. Students could see how each class scored. An elementary school principal in Florida put the chart up to praise/shame her teachers.
I too worry about this:
” I would only add that the ultimate tragedy would be the creation of a new generation of educators and patrons where this sort of shaming feels like teaching.”
And where this sort of shaming will surely keep some of our students from ever receiving an education.
A data wall for public viewing is nineteenth century practice for the twenty-first century. A data wall is on the same ideological level as a dunce cap. Most professional educators understand that this is unsound practice. There is no educational value to creating a competitive environment of winners and losers. Unfortunately, many administrators today may not be trained as educational leaders. They have a corporate sales mentality, and bad practice is a product of putting untrained people in positions of power. The monkeys are running the circus.
Sounds like the old “bottom 10% is fired” idiocracy that plagued corporate America. If we did that to doctors, they would soon avoid the sickest patients.
“. . . it is amazing how many otherwise caring human beings will agree to inflict so much pain on children.”
This is not the first time in history we have seen supposedly “caring human beings will(ing) to inflict so much pain on children”. Arendt, in reference to the German people in the 30s-40s who were willing to do so called it part of the “banality of evil”. Everyday regular folk just “doing their jobs” closing a blind eye and deaf ear to screams of those on whom so much pain was being inflicted.
Yes, there is a banality of evil in public education these days that encompasses the span from illogical and invalid malpractices, through unjust, unethical and, I contend, unconstitutional or at the least breaking the spirit of the constitutional duties of public schools actions through to harming all, and NO! not just some but all the students.
Are you a part of this monstrosity of educational malpractices?
Or are you and have you been fighting these malpractices and refusing to take part?
If you aren’t doing one your doing the other and if it’s the first you’re doing then you’re a “Good German”!
And yes it is a holocaust of the minds and spirits of the most innocent-the children.
These data walls and the testocracy mania is the same as carpet bombing from 30,000 feet. Those bombs can’t tell who they hit: children, grandparents, parents, etc.
But what if the purpose of “shaming” is not to teach, but to humiliate the students you don’t want to teach into leaving?
We know that when “successful” charters use shaming walls, or the equivalent, they come with high attrition rates for at-risk kids. The resulting ability to brag about your “90%+ passing rates” can be directly attributed to the shaming wall philosophy, but not in the way the people who love the shaming wall want you to think.
What happens when shaming walls are used in public schools where the school can’t use it to push out a child, since that school is obligated to teach the child and the reward of shaming walls isn’t the ridding of an expensive child you never wanted to teach in the first place? Do the lowest performing kids suddenly improve based on shaming?
The other side of the shaming wall, of course, is that the kids who do well are celebrated and made very happy. Treat the kids who are smart enough not to need any additional learning support to achieve good scores by celebrating their academic accomplishments. That’s a good way to make sure they stay. Shame the kids who don’t do well — that’s a good way to make sure they leave.
Isn’t that what “choice” is all about? Once you can force a child to “choose” another school because you don’t have any real obligation to him if he leaves — you are off the hooks financially! — that is exactly what the free market encourages all charter schools to do. Figure out the best method to get rid of the kids you prefer not to teach so you can concentrate ONLY on the ones who you find acceptable. Choice! Gotta love it, if you are a reformer. Too bad they pretend they are in “for the kids” when they really mean “the kids whose names we don’t have to put on the shaming wall so that they leave”.
From the posting:
“Virginia 3rd grade teacher, Launa Hall, exposes a shocking example of how corporate reform has lost its soul.”
Editing quibble: they can’t lose what they never had.
Just sayin’…
😎
Several years ago, I saw a racetrack posted in the main hall of one school and each student had made a car with their name on it and placed it on a specific place on the track. Yipes!
Probably the head adminimal’s idea gotten from some seminar.
You’re “right on track” with that 🙂 !
I’ve seen those types of things in elementary classrooms that graph the number of books students had read. In this case interjecting a bit of competition may encourage students to read more, but it is a lot less personal than scores. To me scores on standardized tests are a matter of privacy.
What happened to the philosophy that elementary students don’t need grades – they were either at level, below level, or above level? Or even vaguer – satisfactory (plus or minus) or needs improvement with teacher comments.
In these early grades they just need to learn some basic skills along with a love of learning through meaningful interactions with fellow students led by their teachers.
Forget college at this point. Time enough for that later. Let them enjoy their childhood so they can grow up to be well adjusted adults.
Why “beat a child up” so they’ll learn how to accept adversity as an adult. Why not teach them coping skills so they can conquer and overcome challenges when they arise.
I want my children to be happy not tramatized by life.
To all concerned educators:
I particularly experienced people’s innocent and intentional laughter at my English pronunciation during my early learning years as an immigrant in Canada. Did I feel being insult? Was that intimidating to my well-being?
NO, being well nurtured and confident of my own ability, I am very witty in turning around situation towards snobbish or inconsiderate people. First, I self-admitted to be fresh immigrant with top grade level for all subjects in my own country and then asking them to repeat certain TRICKY words in my mother tongue. Yes, I have the same laughter at them as theirs at me. if they are innocent, we all laugh together heartily. If they are snobbish, they feel embarrassed.
IMHO, nobody can enforce us to do things that are immoral, or make us feel inferior whenever we are honest to our limitation and ability. For instance, nobody can make billionaire club people feel poverty, or can make all conscientious veteran educators in this forum feel being graduated with paper-mills degree or talent-less like Mike Petrilli, Campbell Brown, all PhD Broad-school -superintendents…
In short, the best way to educate children is that to help them to recognize their own potential, to treasure their morality over materialistic impermanence, to be proud of being considerate and compassionate human being and always to sharpen their knowledge through reading as many books in different categories as possible. Most of all, educators reassure them that whenever they can manage time and money within their abilities and their earning, they can be successfully becoming whoever they set their mind to do it. Back2basic
Easier said than done.
Yes, flos56, I agree with you. If Terry Fox can realize his dream for cancer research with on leg to hop across from West to East in Canada, then normal people should be successful to achieve their own practical goal within their reach.
One thing is for sure that people must be honest with their own limitation and abilities through their own experiences in trying out all trials and errors logically.
People need some praises, some encouragement, and some determination in doing all good deeds for others purely for the sake of humanity and civilization. May
Data walls embarrassed me and made me furious when I was teaching. Color coded. And children would go into the “dataroom” and there were pictures of their classmates on red and yellow squares.
Pearson encourages data walls in their professional development.
A “… shocking example of how school reform has lost its soul.”
From my years of experience and close observation, the overwhelming majority of so-called reformers don’t have souls to lose. it’s one reason why they can be so cavalier and gleeful in their destruction.
They have “brands,” which they cultivate relentlessly, but their clueless, venal and often cruel behavior shows that, if they ever had souls, they have been fatally disfigured by market fundamentalism.
Demons don’t have souls, and they are not human. They just look human.
As Lloyd has pointed out many times (thanks Lloyd!), lack of empathy and an inability to feel shame are identifying characteristics of sociopaths and psychopaths.
I’ve post this before, but I think it is very apt in this case (and sadly, a lot of other cases related to so called “reform” – eg, the case where the teacher ripped up the child’s homework paper at Success Academy for not being able to explain how she got her answer, the case where the LA Times posted VAM scores of teachers and teacher Rigoberto Ruelas committed suicide)
We are not dealing with “normal” people, here folks. Far from it. They literally “have no shame”.
“The Path Not Taken (aka, the Psychopath)” (with apologies to Robert Frost)
Two paths diverged in a public school,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, help and tool
I looked down one, like a teaching fool
To how it lent to the student growth
Then took the other, as much more fair,
And having for taps the better claim
Because it was psycho and wanted power,
And as for empathy and care,
Had torn the students apart for game,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this for the Fates
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two paths diverged in a school, and for Gates,
I took the one of Norman Bates,
And that has made all the difference.
should really be “The Path Not Taken ( “aka the Empath“)
“Psychopath” is the taken path.
Sorry for the confusion. Haven’t had my coffee yet.
Maybe data walls are more honest. We’re absolutely ranking kids and schools on test scores despite vehement denials of the obvious. If we’re doing that, if that’s “public policy”, we should be open about it. It’s almost worse to put kids in this situation where every decision is dictated by test scores yet they’re surrounded by adults who are denying that’s happening.
They probably know anyway. They’re there 6 hours a day. They’d have to be morons to miss it. I’m fairly confident the public school kids in Atlanta knew every adult was agonizing over test scores. The management philosophy pervaded those schools, according to the investigator’s report. It had to impact the students. They were soaked in it.
Refer to John Lovell article on the history of education discussed a month or so ago on this site. Data fits in nicely with the “saved and damned” view of society, mirrored in education.
A good average student once went to a school for very smart people. In that school, average was “damned”. Not really understanding this world view, this student accepted the idea that working hard is a good thing, and that education was a holy act. Others of the average rejected the holy act, and did not spend their lives soaking up learning. All students were in a sense deceived by this process.
Time went on and the average student found other views of education that suggested he was “saved” after all. The old Calvinism he had been taught gave way to a more inclusive Arminianism that made him think he was worthy after all. Far from being a poor math student, he discovered that he was a good average math student. At last the road grew long enough to make him into a math teacher. For 30 years he tried to show children what it meant to try to understand mathematics, for it does not require a math genius to relate the genius of math.
One day, an old student happened to see him with his family at a frozen yogurt place. The student was one of the “damned” that the teacher had paid special attention to. They had had several conversations about where the student had lived. They had discussed how different people seemed to be in his new place. The teacher did not really recall teaching the child math, but the child declared that the teacher had made math interesting to him. Clumsily, he hugged the teacher and walked away with his smiling wife.
Just a few years ago, personal relationships could still overcome data. But cut scores are designed to create a permanent class of the “Damned.” Foucault would be proud.
Is “Empower Schools” some kind of private branch of the Obama Administration?
http://empowerschools.org/blog/
Shouldn’t voters know who is running US public ed policy? It obviously isn’t the people we’re electing.
John King seems to be endorsing this lobbying group. Does he speak to anyone outside this exclusive club of “market-based” ed reformers?
It’s the same set of ideas, over and over. No one outside this small group are even invited.
“Invited”. I spoke with a former school district curriculum director, who on occasion works for the Ohio Dept. of Ed. She was interested in applying for a Gates grant. She said that she was told the Gates Foundation is an “invited to apply” process.
I like to know who’s running US public education policy, so I try to read the people behind the political rhetoric.
Here’s one. This is his title:
Portfolio Director at the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation.
He directs a “portfolio” of “public” schools? How can that be? Who elected this person? From where does he derive this power? Michael and Susan Dell’s money, obviously, but that’s enough now? Can I buy a set of public schools? Can anyone who has the scratch?
It’s remarkable and it’s the opposite of “transparent”. People probably assume the people they elect are running things! What suckers THEY are, huh?
https://twitter.com/JoeatMSDF
It has always been the case that many of the people making key decisions were actually not elected, but the Citizens United ruling obliterated the line between “electing” and “buying.”
What this twitter exchange proves, is Prof. Wohlstetter’s paper. Education rephorm’s first objective is “political support”. Second, is “policy environment”. And, in the 3rd and final position, “quantity”, (with “quality”, pulling up the rear).
The reformers actually equate quantity with quality, eg the higher the test score, the more prepared the student, the greater the percentage of students who exceed the cut score, the better the school, the higher the test score “growth” of the students in a teacher’s classes, the better the teacher, etc.
For them, there is no concept of quality that is separate from quantity.
It is like claiming that the paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel should be judged based on how many gallons of paint or how many pounds of plaster Michelangelo used.
It really is that absurd and why anyone accepts such a purely quantitative assessment of quality is something that I will never understand.
Truthout reported on the members of the Democratic Party Platform Committee, today. Clinton selected corporate insiders, reflected in two people, who work at the Albright Stonebridge firm, a business that has the “ability to win favors and influence government officials throughout the world on behalf of corporate clients”. One of the firm’s clients is charter school zealot, Paul Singer. I presume Madelyn Albright’s board membership with David Koch, on the Aspen Institute, which expanded its Society and Education Program, helps achieve corporate profits through Aspen’s “Senior Congressional Education Staff Network”.
The result of the initial expansion, funded by Gates, Broad, Hewlett foundations…”(Key people from Aspen’s program) were in important positions in the Clinton administration or leading important outside reform organizations.”
Thank you SDP for a reminder of a story of “teacher Rigoberto Ruelas committed suicide”
All authorized administrators from that school district shall be severely punished for being ignorance and soulless.
Again, people, who are talent-less but enjoy to have money and power, will definitely and eagerly please devils in doing whatever even if it could be vicious and malicious to innocent people.
We all have souls, but some become demons by trading their souls to devils for material gain. Yes, demons are willing to sell their souls for money, power, fame and lust. Back2basic