Cameras in the Classroom: Is Big Brother Evaluating You?
Video technology can improve safety and classroom practice, but using it to spy and find 'bad teachers' should be a non-starter.
— JANUARY 23, 2015 • BY TIM WALKER —
In January 2014, sixteen video cameras were delivered to the Washington County School District in Tennessee, one for each school and one for the central office. The district didn’t purchase the equipment as part of a school security improvement plan. Washington County, it turned out, had been selected as one of 20 districts across the state to pilot a new program to record classroom interactions and use the clips to help determine teacher effectiveness.
The mobile cameras, however, barely made it out of their boxes before the project was suspended indefinitely.
So what happened? A little transparency might have gone a long way, but it was in short supply in Washington County. District administrators approved the project without notifying school staff or parents. Curious and persistent educators were able to pry some information out of the district, but details remained scarce. Questions piled up quickly. Who paid for the cameras? What are these videos being used for specifically? Who would have control over the cameras? Where are these clips being stored and who is going to see them?
“Once we found out about the plan to put these cameras in the classrooms, we had major concerns that we brought to the attention of the district,” recalls LaDawn Hudgins, president of the Washington County Education Association (WCEA). “So did many parents. A camera was going to record their kids in the classroom and no one bothered to tell them.”
Whether they are planted in a classroom, scattered throughout the school or both, video cameras provoke wildly polarized reactions. One group envisions a safe and secure school and a happy teaching staff using video to improve practice and excitedly sharing “eureka” moments with their colleagues. The other is horrified at the thought of schools being transformed into invasive, zero privacy zones, staffed by suspicious educators, intimidated by the judging and unforgiving eye of a video camera in their classroom.
Most educators probably sit somewhere in the middle. While they recognize the role video cameras play in school security, they have serious and valid concerns over privacy and the impact an excess of surveillance can have on school climate. And although teachers can benefit from the observation and reflection that a sensible use of cameras can cultivate, the situation gets dicey if clips are used to evaluate performance and cameras are there to merely snoop.
Sarah Brown Wessling, a high school English teacher in Johnston, Iowa, and the 2010 National Teacher of the Year, is a keen advocate of video’s potential to help enrich a teacher’s practice.
“I’ve always used video, but only as a tool,” Wessling explains. “I use it to challenge myself and to see more clearly what is going on in my classroom and how my students are learning.”
Whether video cameras are a constructive addition to a classroom depends in large part how and why they were brought into the classroom in the first place.
It was the ‘how’ and ‘why’ (and the ‘who’ ) that unnerved educators and parents in Washington County. LaDawn Hudgins agrees that, under the right circumstances, cameras in the classroom can be useful, especially for newer teachers, but districts must be more proactive in consulting with educators and parents.
“We wanted more information. We wanted transparency,” Hudgins says. “When you hear words like ‘uploaded’ and ‘downloaded,” you want to know: Who’s uploading it, who’s downloading it and for what purpose?”
Consider the Belleville school board in Belleville, New Jersey. In the Fall of 2013, it embarked on a breathtakingly clumsy but audacious effort when it contracted with Clarity Systems to install $2 million worth of state-of-the-art video and audio surveillance technology to monitor virtually every corner of the district’s eight schools – including classrooms, hallways, and staff rooms.
“This equipment is unbelievable. The cameras can zoom into what book you’re holding or how much money you’re paying the cafeteria lady,” explains Mike Mignone, a math teacher at Belleville Middle School and president of the Belleville Education Association. “And the audio capabilities can pick up any conversation you have with a colleague. Staff were walking around school like zombies, afraid to say or do anything!”
District officials insisted the equipment was installed to merely improve student safety, but staff and parents didn’t buy it. The cameras were just another salvo, educators insisted, from a school board and superintendent bent on intimidation, which was on full-display when they filed trumped up tenure charges against Mignone after he denounced the Cameras in the Classroom: Is Big Brother Evaluating You? - NEA Today:
