Teachers foresee school surveillance hell
THE ASSOCIATION OF Teachers and Lecturers has seen the future, and its one in which school league tables are drawn from a live classroom CCTV feed that constantly measures kids and tutors against a computerised system of targets.
Julia Neal, president of the ATL, explained at its annual conference in Torquay yesterday how she had seen how classroom surveillance and education targets were beginning to converge into a binary system of success and failure that left no space for real people.
She described her "Orwellian" vision of 2013, when nitpicking school inspectors had supreme power. Everyone was watched and tested constantly to see if they were good enough to make the grade.
"Luckily for the inspectors, CCTV is now obligatory in schools so they can watch teachers in action at any time, without prior notice," she envisaged.
This was all presided over by a Ministry of Trust that produced school league tables that fluctuated constantly in reaction to the latest batch of rolling, pupil tests.
The trouble with nitpicking, she said, was that it was demoralising. It left children feeling "disengaged and alienated", and inclined to truancy. It made teachers, already frustrated by the draconian system, its lack of trust and autonomy, want to leave the profession.
Built atop all this strife, the league table system presented a misleading record of success and failure.
What's the point of naming and shaming a school with poor test results because its intake of children was drawn from the have-nots in a deprived neighbourhood, while the I'm Alright Jack yuppies in their reconditioned ghetto mansions sent their kids where only they could afford to send them, she said - in not so many words.
Douglas Adams had shown us how to deal with the future's tendency to dystopia, she said. As he said, "the best way to predict the future is to build it".
And lo, the teachers rose up. Well, they applauded.
Neal described her "Utopian" future as one in which the inspectors had been routed, schools were left alone to encourage children's "creativity, personal, social and emotional skills", and academic learning was encouraged as a broad pursuit, instead of one run along narrowly defined channels of knowledge.
Kids were better behaved. Everyone was happy. But there was one problem with Neal's Utopian vision of the future. It featured TV chef Jamie Oliver. That just goes to show how heaven and hell are not wholly mutually exclusive. ยต
Share this:
ShareBusiness Intelligence Software
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Enterprise Accounting Software
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Enterprise Systems Management
People with self styled utopias tend to be left grasping at straws when it comes time to tie their performance to revenue. "It's unfair!" the teacher's union shouts on behalf of the school districts, clutching their billions of dollars in investments they siphon interest off of for double digit annual increases in administrator pay. "It's no good for the kids!" they scream as local families face ever increasing city property tax bills at a time of record high food, energy and housing costs.

75% of my area's municipal property taxes pay for local schools - no matter that I have no children and may never have them.

Teacher's should understand issues have more than one side and people working in the real world tend to have CCTV cameras and other electronic monitoring systems grading their performance....
What are you talking about??
James wrote: "75% of my area's municipal property taxes pay for local schools - no matter that I have no children and may never have them."

Same here. Not only do poor Americans get public education, so do Jose's children, and he's an illegal immigrant (though, most of his children are American citizens.) And guess what? We both benefit greatly from the fact that they all get an education at public (our) expense.

I'd like to ask the Bushies and the yellow journalists at Faux News just *who* they think is fighting the war in Iraq? And who do they think is going to be paying into Social Security as the baby boomers retire? 

Wow, just because the guy has different "electronic monitoring systems" grading his performance he thinks that children should suffer the same fate!

And worse, he thinks that being monitored is just a normal and acceptable fact of life. The kind of person who doesn't care being called "human resource".

It's all about money!

Oh James, please don't have robot^H^H kids, it will be better for them.
Well I'm not sure why, but I guess that's one vote for Orwellian Dystopia. You're also missing the point: the teachers are not in favor of rampaging money allotted to administrators (i.e. inspectors and the like), they are trying to advocate an environment where children and teachers are comfortable and given what they need to succeed, not what some hysterical parents and admins are pushing for. As a soon-to-be teacher in America, I plan to fight the good fight as well.
and the teachers wonder why people are pulling their kids out of the public school system....

private, parochial and homeschooling is on a rise every year and teachers still can't figure it out.
Uh, you need to go and tell the nice people in white coats that it is time for your medication again.
The phrase "nitpicking school inspectors had supreme power" caused a horrifying image of Dolores Umbridge to invade my brain.... Power corrupts....