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Re: Surveillance in NYC
Remember Chris Cerf? He used to work for Edison before moving to his
new job with NY Public Schools.
And what's up with Randi Weingarten? I thought she OK'd this horrid
monstrosity. Now she's rethinking it??
On Jan 21, 2008, at 11:42 AM, Horn, James wrote:
Part of the genius of Michel Foucault was in showing how the
repressive organization or society may use intermittent
surveillance or just the threat of surveillance to accomplish full
social control--if the subjects are unaware of where the
surveillance is happening.
In the panoptic (all-seeing) schema, those social objects who don't
know whether or not they are being watched perform as if they were,
thus accomplishing the goal of punishment, which in today's society
is social rehabilitation.
Today's piece in the NYTimes offers a perfect example, with ten
percent of New York's under surveillance accomplishing cheaply what
might have been required by 100 percent. We can imagine, too, the
anxiety that teachers will undoubtedly experience every time they
consider moving off their scripted lessons designed to promote
thought control and behavioral control of the children:
New York City has embarked on an ambitious experiment, yet to be
announced, in which some 2,500 teachers are being measured on how
much their students improve on annual standardized tests.
The move is so contentious that principals in some of the 140
schools participating have not told their teachers that they are
being scrutinized based on student performance and improvement.
While officials say it is too early to determine how they will use
the data, which is already being collected, they say it could
eventually be used to help make decisions on teacher tenure or as a
significant element in performance evaluations and bonuses. And
they hold out the possibility that the ratings for individual
teachers could be made public.
“If the only thing we do is make this data available to every
person in the city — every teacher, every parent, every principal,
and say do with it what you will — that will have been a powerful
step forward,” said Chris Cerf, the deputy schools chancellor who
is overseeing the project. “If you know as a parent what’s the
deal, I think that whole aspect will change behavior.”
The effort comes as educators nationwide are struggling to figure
out how to find, train and measure good teachers. Many education
experts say that until teacher quality improves in urban schools,
student performance is likely to stagnate and the achievement gap
between white and minority students will never be closed. Other
school systems, including those in Dallas and Houston as well as in
the whole state of Tennessee, are also using student performance
and improvement as factors in evaluating teachers.
The United Federation of Teachers, the city’s teachers’ union, has
known about the experiment for months, but has not been told which
schools are involved, because the Education Department has promised
those principals confidentiality.
Randi Weingarten, the union president, said she had grave
reservations about the project, and would fight if the city tried
to use the information for tenure or formal evaluations or even
publicized it. She and the city disagree over whether such moves
would be allowed under the contract.
“There is no way that any of this current data could actually,
fairly, honestly or with any integrity be used to isolate the
contributions of an individual teacher,” Ms. Weingarten said. “If
one permitted this, it would be one of the worst decisions of my
professional life.” . . . .
Well, Randi, one has permitted this, the one is you. You stood in
the doorway between this nightmare scenario and the classroom
teachers, and you chose to slink away into the darkness under the
pretense that you had somehow protected the identities of those
teachers under surveillance. Can you tell us when you became part
of the mechanism?
"The panoptic schema, without disappearing as such or losing any of
its properties, was destined to spread throughout the social body,"
Foucault explains; "its vocation was to become a generalized
function" (Discipline 207). The ultimate result is that we now live
in the panoptic machine: "We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor
on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects
of power, which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its
mechanism" (Discipline 217).
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