Cameras In The Classrooms

Espionage in the Learning Cell

Four high-definition closed circuit television cameras and microphones have been installed in the classrooms of each of hundreds of British schools and the authorities do not deny that they are determined to expand this surveillance on a massive scale.

They claim that the footage, of which the principal is in charge, is used primarily for the purpose of teacher training but that collateral benefits include the inhibiting of bullying and students’ false allegations against teachers.

The phrase “teacher training” is widely viewed as code for teachers’ forced acquiescence to principals’ micromanagement with the sovereign right of the principal to fire, without challenge, any teacher deemed noncompliant or incompetent for reasons that they need not articulate.

It has already proven a potent constraint on freedom of expression, intellectual risk-taking, flexibility of technique and style and much else that is essential to the viability of the profession. Obviously there can be no significant scope for academic judgment, originality and interpretation of results when teachers are straightjacketed by morbid scrutiny.

Given the prevailing instinct of self-preservation and the shriek of bills that need to be paid, teachers are likely to choose to play it safe rather than get booted from their profession. Even the mavericks and gadflies, who often are among the most dynamic teachers who leave the most cherished and indelible impression on kids, are spooked by the glare of Big Brother gone wild.

And robbing kids of their privacy rights is inexcusable. Leading them to take that theft for granted as an administrative privilege is despicable.

The wicked aim of these cameras and microphones is disguised by the benign sounding reasons that officials give for installing them. They claim that the cameras are there to record “best practices” for producing dramatic improvement in behavior, concentration and productivity.

Sound familiar? Jargon lends itself to transplantation across the seas.

The cameras at first were ensconced above school entrances and exits as intruder alerts. But quickly their potential as devices of intrigue and intimidation was appreciated by the educational authorities. Some schools, such as Harrop Fold in Salford, England, unblushingly avow that their cameras are positioned for only one reason: to monitor teachers.

And guess what! The British counterparts to our reactionary self-dubbed “reformers” crow that ever since the cameras have been engaged, students’ standardized test scores rose astronomically. They say it’s no coincidence.

What’s no coincidence is that the proponents of these invasive lenses happen to also be fiercely anti-union. Not surprisingly they also insist that teachers feel “supported” by the spying. Of course they don’t call it spying. (They too, like Tweed, have an Office of Gibberish and Jive.) It’s no stretch to suspect that they would also claim that teachers both in Britain and America would feel more “supported” if they were disburdened of albatrosses such as equal pay and buffers to employer abuse.

It’s the same cyanide-laced speech. Only the accent is different.

Mary Bousted, the general secretary of Britain’s Association of Teachers and Lecturers, isn’t fooled by the deceptions. She realizes, for instances, that the cameras were not, as claimed, deployed to stop students from making false allegations against teachers. (That blood sport is a global pandemic.)

The whole controversy would have been averted if there were across the board respect for the law. But in Britain, as here, there are often no sanctions against management when its violations are actual official policies.

An agreement between the teachers unions, their employers and the government explicitly restricts the monitoring of teachers to three hours in any school year! That fact ought to render moot any argument for the moral equivalence of mandating cameras as opposed to banning them.

But the law these days is a chameleon that is at the disposal of management for placement in any environment it has created and decided is suitable. Unless you’re one of them, be indignant at your own peril.

Some of the crazy trends in education originated here and spread to Britain and many of the mad vogues that we are saddled with here were conceived over there. Clearly our nations share one sibling: Big Brother.

British Teachers Boycott Testing

94 Percent of British Teachers Vote to Boycott Testing Next Year

It's official and not close. Thank God for the moral courage of these teachers to act on their convictions. The boycott is happening unless British officials agree to entirely new assessments.

Will the NEA and AFT suits notice, or are their swollen heads too far up their arses to have any hope of extraction? From The Telegraph:

Head teachers have voted overwhelmingly to back a boycott of national tests for seven and 11 year olds, rounding off one of Labour's worst weeks in office.

The move is a personal blow to Ed Balls, the children's secretary, whose speech to the National Association of Head Teachers annual conference just before the vote failed to placate school heads who want to see "an end to the tyranny of annual testing".

A joint boycott by heads and classroom teachers could spell the end of Sats, taken by about 1.2 million primary schoolchildren every year.

Despite warnings from the Government that the action would be "unlawful" and urging from Mr Balls to "act responsibly", 94 per cent of delegates at the conference in Brighton voted to support a ballot of members for the disruption of next year's tests.

Heads believe the papers in English, maths and science have narrowed the curriculum and damaged teaching and learning.

Sue Sayles, a past president of the Association, said: "It is our moral duty to show Ed that we have balls."

Steve Iredale, a primary head teacher from Barnsley, who proposed the motion condemned the ritual of annual testing and the use of flawed data to judge schools and heads.

"It is a mechanistic education system which reduces children's learning to numerical nonsense," he said. . .

In Darwin We Trust: Another Study In Contrasts

A stark contrast in the division of church and state:

US twenty dollar note with God emblazoned on it

British ten pound note with Darwin on it.

h/t Hendrick Hertzberg

Britain Scraps Student Testing (And A Country Breathes Again) II

From across the pond, Brits are abandoning their high-stakes tests...

Education unions plan 2010 Sats boycott

Teachers are threatening to bring the Sats system in England to a halt by boycotting next year's tests.

Two of the biggest education unions will ask their members to refuse to take part in the tests, which they say have become "unacceptable for the future of children's education".

It is a significant escalation in the teaching profession's opposition to the testing regime, and comes after ministers scrapped the tests for 14-year-olds last year. The two unions, representing more than 300,000 teachers and heads, say they will conduct this year's tests of all seven and 11-year-olds in May only on condition that they will be the last.

The National Union of Teachers will put the plans to its annual conference over Easter, while the National Association of Head Teachers will consider an identical plan at its conference at the end of April. Both organisations say the tests have damaged primary education and put children under unnecessary stress.

Mick Brookes, the NAHT general secretary, said: "Testing narrows the curriculum and makes learning shallow, because the tests are simply regurgitative. Then the results are published in league tables, and schools in the toughest areas, where you've got hardest to teach children, are ridiculed on an annual basis. There is high stress for children; some will already be spending up to 10 hours a week rehearsing these tests. It's a complete waste of time. It is unconscionable that we should simply stand by and allow the educational experience of children to be blighted."

Christine Blower, the NUT's acting general secretary, said: "Primary schools' patience in enduring the damage caused by the tests has been stretched to the limit, and beyond. Our deadline for the end of Sats by 2010 is reasonable, and our alternative is one that will enhance teaching and learning. Above all else, the government needs to understand that this year's national curriculum tests will be the last."

Sats tests for 14-year-olds were scrapped in the wake of the collapse of the marking process last year, when thousands of students faced delayed results after an American firm, ETS, contracted to oversee the tests for the first time, failed to deliver.

Sats were introduced in 1991 by the Conservatives, but were boycotted by several teaching unions in 1993. Last year's failures, as well as a report by Cambridge University highlighting the inaccuracy of Sats marking and the stress the tests cause children, has fuelled union opposition.

The threat of a boycott will now hang over a Sats review that was set up by the government when it announced the end of tests at 14. If teachers refuse to conduct tests, ministers will not be able to publish school-by-school results, which are used to create the annual league tables.

Two other unions, the NASUWT and the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said they would not take the same action. Mary Bousted, general secretary of the ATL, said the tests were "unreliable, don't reflect pupils' real ability, take up too much school time, and demotivate children and school staff". But she added that the ATL did not support a boycott.

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: "These tests are important as they allow parents to see how their children and local schools are doing. Any attempt to boycott them could undermine this and risk removing a basic right from parents."

He reiterated the words of the schools secretary, Ed Balls, who said the tests were "not set in stone", adding that there were pilots of alternatives under way.

What's With The Brits Being All, For Lack Of A Better Word, Right?

From Newshoggers, more British getting things righter than us!

Destructive Criticism Is Warranted For Torture Cover-up

By Steve Hynd

The Guardian's frontpage headliner article on Britain's complicity in US detainee programs has a lede that doesn't pull any punches:

UK hid illegal acts and breached basic human rights of detainees in US rendition programme, report finds.

Britain has been condemned in a highly critical United Nations report for breaching basic human rights and "trying to conceal illegal acts" in the fight against terrorism.

The article continues:

The report accuses British intelligence officers of interviewing detainees held incommunicado in Pakistan in "so-called safe houses where they were being tortured".

It adds that Britain, with a number of countries, has sent interrogators to Guantánamo Bay in a further example of what it says "can be reasonably understood as implicitly condoning" torture and ill-treatment, adding that the US was able to create its system for moving terror suspects around foreign jails only with the support of its allies.

Some individuals faced "prolonged and secret detention" and practices that breached bans on torture and other forms of ill-treatment, the report says.

...It adds: "Grave human rights violations by States such as torture, enforced disappearances or arbitrary detention should therefore place serious constraints on policies of cooperation by States, including by their intelligence agencies, with States that are known to violate human rights. The prohibition against torture is an absolute and peremptory norm of international law".

It continues: "The active or passive participation by States in the interrogation of persons held by another State constitutes an internationally wrongful act if the State knew or ought to have known that the person was facing a real risk of torture or other prohibited treatment, including arbitrary detention."

Illegal acts that breached basic human rights. That's how the world sees it, because that's how it is.

In the UK, the independent reviewer of terror laws Lord Carlisle has called for a judicial inquiry into British government and intelligence complicity in American programs, which could easily lead to prosecutions from highest to lowest. Lawmakers have become increasingly vocal, on a bipartisan basis, in calling for full accountability. People are shocked and angry that their nation was involved, even at a slight remove, in such wholesale breaking of some of the most valued international laws.

Yet here in America we've a situation where the guy who ran for the highest office on a platform that included ending those illegal acts has:

- Used a blanket state secrets defense to stiffle legal accountability for internationally wrongful acts and keep lawsuits out of the courts.

- Said via his officials that he's not going to prosecute those who actually tortured or perpetrated other abuses of human rights..

- Defended even the lawyers who criminally gave justifications for these illegal acts.

- Shown no inclination to indict those who have publicly admitted ordering these grave human rights violations.

Today on CNN, Markos Moulitsas said that progressives' challenge was to tread "that line from destructive criticism to constructive criticism".

I've no problem whatsoever with saying that if the Obama administration lets the orderers, justifiers and perpetrators of these crimes against humanity walk away from justice then the criticism should be destructive. No matter what else they might accomplish, they will not deserve our support if there's not enough change on this issue. It's just that big of a deal.

Britain Scraps Student Testing (And A Country Breathes Again)

Some good news from across the pond:

Will American Testaholics Notice That Some Parts of the World Are Getting Sober?
The Brits have already dumped testing for 14-year olds. Now they move to do the same for 11 year olds. From The Guardian:

National tests for 11-year olds in England should be scrapped, says the government's advisory committee on mathematics education.

Sats are helping create an "impoverished" curriculum, with teachers spending months preparing pupils to answer test questions rather than building deeper understanding, says the committee. It suggests that the results generated in this way may overstate children's true abilities.

The committee, which was set up seven years ago to represent maths teachers and educationists in talks with ministers, wants the tests phased out in favour of allowing teachers to reach their own judgments on the quality of pupils' work over several years.

Its comments come in a paper submitted to a government review of testing, which is being carried out in the wake of last autumn's decision by Ed Balls, the schools secretary, to scrap Sats tests for 14-year-olds.

The biggest inquiry into primary education for 40 years concluded last month that the tests – the basis of school league tables and targets – were helping to marginalise the teaching of non-tested subjects such as history, geography and the arts.

The committee's paper said: "There is a view that in many Year 6 classrooms between January and May, pupils experience a less than broad and balanced curriculum because of preparation for testing towards the end of their final year in primary school. These high-stakes tests serve more to provide national benchmarks than to aid pupils' learning.

"It is our belief that the preparation for testing at key stage 2 is disproportionate to the educational outcomes for the individuals taking the tests. If a broad and balanced curriculum is to be encouraged, then schools need advice that supports them to make judgements about their pupils without the pressure of single snapshots of attainment. . . .