This week in the War on Workers: Teachers protest "data walls" that shame students

Over the past year, grade school students in the low-income city of Holyoke, Massachusetts, have faced having their names and standardized test scores posted in classrooms on “data walls,” for all their classmates to see. Horrible, right? But it shouldn’t be unexpected, as educational policy pushes standardized tests to the center of what goes on in schools, and as test scores are used for ever more punitive purposes. The story of how the data walls came to light is  particularly revealing, though.

Teachers and parents, outraged about the data walls, went to a school committee meeting to complain; at the meeting, the schools superintendent insisted that students’ names should never be used, and suggested that he’d be cracking down on individual teachers who were doing this bad thing. That contradicted testimony from a parent, Paula Burke, who said she’d directly requested that the superintendent “send a clear directive to ALL principals and teachers regarding the sharing of private student information,” but “This has not been done.” But it raised the very real possibility that teachers would be scapegoated for a practice to which they had first drawn attention. But then, Sarah Jaffe reports:

In response to his comments, the teachers released copies of a PowerPoint presentation given to teachers and paraprofessionals for kindergarten (yes, kindergarten) through third grade at Kelly Elementary School in Holyoke on October 11, 2013—at which Superintendent Paez delivered the welcoming remarks. The slides, provided to In These Times by teacher activists, clearly show sample data walls with students’ first names and in some cases, last initials.

Yes, the practice that the superintendent was all disapproving of in front of reporters and the school committee was drawn directly from a training he introduced. Whoopsies! But if teachers weren’t organized to fight back against practices that hurt their students and retaliation against themselves, this would be a different story. Already, the decks are stacked against teachers fighting back:

“The data walls really speak to a bigger problem,” Kaeppel says. The battle against data walls is just one fight in a broader war—everywhere, testing is replacing teaching time, and test scores are used to pressure students, to determine whether teachers can keep their jobs, and to rate schools as successes or as “failures,” with dire consequences. [Teacher Agustin] Morales points out that his students in Holyoke spend 27 days out of the 180-day school year taking standardized tests rather than learning. [...]

The constant exhaustion means that the union must prove to its members that a fight is worth the effort. That’s why [Educators for a Democratic Union, a progressive caucus within the Massachusetts Teachers Association] is trying to build solidarity through concrete victories—like the effort to fight the data walls in Holyoke. Kaeppel, who was one of [Barbara] Madeloni’s students at UMass, says that it seemed like a winnable fight to the Holyoke EDU members and their supporters from outside of the district, and has served to catalyze some parent support. Administrators, she says, assume that the lower-income parents in Holyoke are not involved with their kids’ schooling and won’t challenge school practices, but they got a surprise when parents and teachers spoke together at the school committee meeting.

But however outgunned by test-crazy politicians and billionaires, teachers and parents are there, in kids’ lives. The need to fight back is so obvious.

(Disclosure: My father is a member of EDU and has been involved in the campaign against Holyoke data walls. And background: I’ve written about Barbara Madeloni in the past.)

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Daily Kos

This week in the War on Workers: Teachers protest "data walls" that shame students