CURMUDGUCATION: Success Academy Violates Student Privacy (Again)

CURMUDGUCATION: Success Academy Violates Student Privacy (Again)

Success Academy Violates Student Privacy (Again)

In a way, I can almost sympathize with Eva Moskowitz and Success Academy. Schools can find themselves in a real bind at times. A student can go to the media (social or traditional) and tell a story of how he was repeatedly hauled into the principal's office and disciplined because he was fighting bullies who picked on him for being gay, and the school must hold its tongue, even if it has a folder thick with reports of the student's repeated harassment of students that he suspected of hitting on his girlfriend. A student can claim to be unfairly punished for no reason, even if the school has a folder for that student showing a history of bullying. The schools may be armed with a defense, but they can't use it.

In every story of how a student was treated by a school, the school has its own story. It may be a legitimate story, or that story may reveal that the school behaved just as badly as the student claims. But the public is not going to know, because schools have a mandate, both legal and ethical, to treat student privacy as sacrosanct.

"Don't cross me, you little tattletales!"

This is as it should be. Teachers and staff have access to an enormous amount of student information, and so they have an obligation to keep that information just as private as humanly possible. It is a fundamental ethic of teaching, both because it's the only decent way to behave and because if families and students couldn't trust the school, it would never be able to do its job (and there are plenty of examples of places here families don't trust the school, and the school function suffers because of it).

There are certainly moments in which schools and individual teachers drop this ball. But for the most part, schools take privacy seriously. Here's an example-- I was the football game announcer for twenty years at my school, and in the last of those years, I was instructed to no longer call for a CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Success Academy Violates Student Privacy (Again)