Data Bound and Data Gagged: How Teachers are Made Ineffectual and Silent

In fact, the overlooking of the humanity of students and their teachers becomes more and more possible as they start becoming faceless statistics and data points. Much lip service is given but students quickly start being referred to be a reading level, or a status, or a test grade while teachers start being referred to by some nomenclature pertaining either to their tenure, their rating, or their specialty. Worse yet, as the standardized test starts becoming the yardstick by which students, their teachers, and their school are held to entire school communities can be quickly reduced to an average score despite the level of individual progress the students have made. These tests don’t return to knowledge incrementally, they require heavy hammer and beating style teaching, while the discipline that students are exposed to–hours of sitting in one place without speaking and reading difficultly worded texts–are hard even for adults. Once evaluated under these difficult circumstances students are labeled by their performance.

The names and labels that are used as descriptors in data are steeped in doublespeak and euphemism—for example failing students have been renamed “at risk”, while a student who is learning English is called an “ELL” (English Language Learner). The more complicated the structure of the teaching program, or more exacting the data collected the more likely it is that some euphemistic acronym will be used to describe a human being. Psychologically speaking, it is then easier to dehumanize the decisions that have to be made—it wasn’t terribly hard to begin with as American public education is hardly a real concern, but rather just one of 16 pawns send to the alter in the game of political chess—and it is rather easy to justify the future potential of the republic against a bottom line when really all you are doing is stopping abstract numbers from being fed to abstract letters, rather than cutting books from kids.

The ways that this quantifiable data—passing or failing standardized test score being paramount among them—is steered by Federal Mandate in a wholly extra-Constitutional manner. Dependent on a variety of reporting tools that all assert to measure some domain or the next, the schools that score the lowest collectively are put on notice. “Shape up or shut down” is the heart banner flying over their heads as repeated scores don’t pass muster. What follows is a cascade of measures that one can assume are only in place to actually shut down school by removing funding and demanding more programs, which amounts to the budgetary equivalent giving a horse less food and making him work more hours, pulling heavier loads.