Bill Gates – Put Surveillance Cameras in Every Classroom
After Adam Lanza’s murderous rampage in Newtown, liberals scoffed at the idea of armed teachers in every classroom.
I’m eager to know how they feel about surveillance in every classroom.
The College Fix reports.
Bill Gates Wants America to Spend $5B for Video Cameras in Every Classroom
Bill Gates wants the country to spend $5 billion on video cameras in every classroom, footage which would then be used for teacher evaluations.
It remains to be seen how much the Microsoft mogul is willing to chip in.
Reports Fast Company in an exclusive interview:
Actors do it. Professional athletes do it. Now Bill Gates wants the country to spend $5 billion for every teacher in every classroom in every district to be filmed in action so they can be evaluated and, maybe, improve. …
In a talk he gave for a TED / PBS special to be aired May 7 (filmed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on April 4), Gates discussed the plan to tape teachers, its estimated $5 billion price tag, and the pilot program he funded, the Measures of Effective Teaching, conducted with 3,000 teachers in seven districts. They reported three years of findings in January on a teaching evaluation system that combines test scores, student evaluations, and classroom assessments, where teachers are graded by impartial observers.
The idea of reevaluating how we test teachers is spreading, but remains controversial–even without the privacy issues involved in filming the classroom. “I know some teachers aren’t immediately comfortable with a camera in the classroom,” Gates acknowledged, then said that could be overcome by allowing teachers to pick which lessons they want filmed–which would seem to undermine the validity of any findings.
Bill Gates Wants America to Spend $5B for Video Cameras in Every Classroom (The College Fix)
Comments
Some grade schools, affiliated with schools of education, have been built with observation rooms adjoining each classroom. Student teachers can watch how experienced teachers work, and instructors can watch and evaluate student teachers.
Could run them like regular security cameras are run… no one bothers to watch the videos and after a set amount of time, a couple of weeks maybe, the memory is scrubbed and recycled… so long as nothing happens.
Normally I’d probably be anti-surveillance but I’ve worked in retail and when it comes right down to it, normal people are recorded at work all the time. You work with a camera on you. Particularly if you work as a cashier.
And one thing about that is… when the til comes up with an error and they go back in the footage to see what happened… what they very well may discover is that it was an honest error. (I recall overhearing just that conversation… “Yeah, we figured out what happened, you just this *this* wrong…” and so the person still had a job.)
And school students are more important than the money in a til, aren’t they?
And if teachers don’t like being watched, they also will have the ability to show what “really happened” if they get accused of politicking or being otherwise out of line. Didn’t some University (in Florida?) just fire some guy because of a complaint because he said something about killing? And students are saying it was just the figure of speech meaning about the same thing as “on a roll?”
Wouldn’t it be a good thing if the complaint process had an empirical quality instead of an hysterical one?