Miles
Bryant
University
of Nebraska Lincoln
January
2001
Abstract
Issues
of control and supervision are ubiquitous in education.How
much supervision of instruction is necessary?Who
decides?How does discipline contribute
to student learning?How much authority
do teachers have?Who should make
decisions about curricular content?What
is the parental role and how much influence should the parent have?How
do teachers and administrators relate to each other.Issues
of control affect every school building and every classroom and every personnel
relationship at one point or another.This
case is designed to help groups of educators identify issues where control
and evaluation and assessment loom as education moves along at a rapid
pace into the 21st century.The
case is designed to be interactive and done in groups.
Introduction
This
is a descriptive case of a different sort of school. It is a fictional
American school in the year 2050. There is, of course, a real danger in
imagining what schools will be like well into the next century. Nonetheless,
in the time period around a millennia shift, such guesses about the future
are to be expected. The features of this futuristic school are outlined
below. The case is kept intentionally general in order to facilitate discussion.
As in any such case, you may have many questions about specifics. In this
case the need for specific detail is less important than the educational
innovations that appear in this school. At the conclusion of this case
there are questions to which you may wish to respond and a few suggested
readings that will add to an understanding of the case.
The
Case of Panopticon School
Panopticon
School, a 10?12 high school, is located in a medium sized mid-western city
in the United States. Middle income families, predominantly white but with
a healthy mix of racial diversity, send students to this school. For the
most part, families have aspirations for their children and expect them
to continue their education after graduation from Panopticon.
A nearby land-grant university is the higher education destination for
many students. A community college system that offers transfer credit programs
is also an attractive choice for many graduates. A small number of the
very best students migrate to other higher education institutions in the
country. A few attend the technical university recently chartered by EnCom
Corporation as a degree granting four year college.
As
the public educational system survived frequent attempts to open up education
to private providers through tuition remission and voucher proposals, the
realization that education plays a vital role in the strength of the nation’s
economy led to an increased federal role.The
governance of the local school was gradually removed from the direct authority
of locally elected boards of education.Professional
educators, certified and endorsed by national boards in various fields
of education, now operate the schools and answer directly to state authorities.The
state oversees curriculum content and review and hires teachers, placing
these individuals in schools according to the needs of the state.A
state wide parent’s advisory association exerts significant political influence
on broad policy issues.Students and
parents are able to apply for enrollment to any school in the state they
wish to attend but must satisfy an option enrollment board that their reasons
for moving from their home district are educationally sound.
The
average class size in Panopticon is about
ten students per class. There are 250 students in the three grades. It
is considered a model program and educators from the region make frequent
visits to Panopticon. Many of Panopticon’s
programs are considered innovative. For example, students are not segregated
according to chronological age and grade level. Rather, they are grouped
and organized according to their logical reasoning and problem solving
skills. Some of the predictions of a book from the 1990s called The
Bell Curve have come to pass and it has become far more common in schools
to group children by their levels of cognitive ability.
The
primary subjects are reading, mathematics, natural sciences, logical reasoning,
computer science, social sciences, languages, multicultural education,
information processing, and health education. In Panopticon, students are
placed in-groups with such names as Neptune, Mars, Pluto, Andromeda, and
Venus. Competition between groups is used by the teachers as a motivational
tool and the level of competition is quite keen. There is a clear emphasis
on building group identity and cohesiveness. A visitor to Panopticon
will notice in the lobby a large chart that displays the relative standings
for the different groups in the annual competitions. A trophy case is on
display that identifies the winners of various competitions in academic
areas. In addition to bragging rights within the school, students on the
winning team receive a monitory award for the top place. There are twenty?five
groups. Faculty members are assigned to facilitate these groups. Both students
and faculty are assigned to these groups randomly. Once assigned, they
can only change by petitioning a panel of administrators and students established
to hear such requests. Incidently, this
school offers no inter?mural athletic program; students who participate
in sports do so on local club teams sponsored by private athletic associations.
Principles
of self regulated learning guide much of what takes place in the school.
All students develop at entrance an individual education plan. This plan
orients students and is reviewed periodically. Since much of the instruction
is self-paced, this plan provides many with a necessary organizational
framework.Each student and parent
and teacher and administrator has access to the plan which can be easily
obtained from the school’s large server with a password.Students
and parents are encouraged to refer to this plan frequently and it serves
as a check point for all major decisions students and parents and teachers
make about important decisions.
Panopticon
has a few special education students but only in the area of speech/language
deficits. These students are provided with specialized computer assisted
instruction in their diagnosed deficit areas.Twice
a month, a special education instructor logs into their computer files
and checks their progress.There are
no labeled behaviorally disordered children in this school although school
staff deal with a group of adolescents typical in all ways.
The
architecture of the school will be the first thing you would notice. Panopticon
is a high tech school and its appearance supports this claim. It is a glass
building, circular in design with floor to ceiling windows on all sides.
Internally there are free standing walled cubes that house restrooms and
storage facilities. Otherwise, all walls are transparent. There is free
vision throughout the building from a central tower that rises in the middle
of the structure. This wasdone
intentionally as research done between 2000 and 2020 found that such structures
offered a powerful remedy to both discipline problems and off task learning
behaviors. You may wish to read what Astor, Meyer and Behre
(1999) discovered about the physical layout of schools.Administrators
and teachers watcheverything
that goes on. Additionally, parents can observe their children at
work without being intrusive. In fact, a recent state law requires that
all parents spend five hours each academic year having in?school contact
with each school?aged child. Panopticon’s
unique design facilitates this parental obligation.
Administrative
offices are located in the glass tower and permit wide visual access to
every level of the building.When
administrators want privacy, they merely activate an electric device that
makes their glass walls opaque and prevent those outside from viewing the
administrators at work.Administrators
can still see out into the building, however.
Panopticon
is a highly technological school in other ways.Students
do all of their work on the school’s networked computer system.Each
student has a wireless personal computer that he or she can take home and
that plugs into a networked panel at their work station.The
following are some of the main features of this technological work station:
1)Ethernet
access to the web;
2)Individualized
word processing software adapted to the developmental level of the student;
3)A
statistical package for data analysis;
4)An
interactive link to the University and City libraries;
5)A
Parental Access System (PAS) that provides for two way audio and visual
communication between the students PC and a school provided wireless computer
in the student’s home;
6)A
direct link to the state’s Writing Exchange Program (WEP) in which students
in schools across the state go through a step by step series of writing
projects designed to educate all students through writing exchanges about
the cultural diversity of the state;
7)A
video editing program that allows students to easily produce video documentation;
8)See
you, see me technology that allows students to transmit and receive visual
images of others;
9)A
central data collection program (CDC) that allows for online data collection
of student activity, recording and storing all created files for teacher
and administrator assessment;
10)An
electronic portfolio or folder that stores all electronic documents that
students and teachers wish to keep to demonstrate student progress.
Teachers
monitor the work and progress of students.Curricular
content is given to students mainly through computer assisted instruction
and is aligned to measurable objectives.Students
progress through a series of online demonstrations of mastery.These
objectives are tied to the students IEP and because of the lack of direct
teacher control, the IEP serves as the guide of the student’s behavior
and performance.Should students
engage in any off-task behavior, i.e. that which is beyond the scope of
their IEP, for any length of time, a warning note will be generated by
their computer program.If the behavior
continues, an alert is sent to the supervising teacher of that period.When
a student completes a unit of curricular work, four entries are automatically
made to chart that progress: 1) into the student’s own performance file;
2) into the school’s CDC; 3) into the teacher’s file on that student; and
4) into the parents file on his or her child.
Included
with the simple notation about work completed, an APGAR score is reported.This
is a ratio of Expected or Predicted Growth to actual growth.Developed
by a national team of educational psychologists, the APGAR ratio has become
widely used to evaluate student progress.As
a counseling tool, the APGAR has taken the guesswork and mystery out of
the determination of whether or not a student is working up to his or her
ability.Expected or predicted growth
is measured as a variable that is constructed through a combination of
psychological and genetic testing.The
levels of attainment that each student should achieve at precise points
in their learning process can be calculated.When
students fail to progress as they should, their APGAR score will indicate
this.The APGAR was invented by Dr.
Jeremy
Bentham
of Stanford University, long known as a leading institution in the field
of educational measurement.
While
the system is well organized to monitor student progress, these are adolescent
students after all.Thus, there are
times when inappropriate behavior escalates to the point where the school
can no longer tolerate the student.Such
students attend behavior modification panels conducted by trained school
administrators.If the problems persist,
pharmaceutical intervention will be utilized.If
the student remains unresponsive, placement in a state residential facility
occurs.
Parental
support, as mentioned earlier, is important.Each
teacher and parent can communicate electronically via the network.Furthermore,
parents are able to use the interactive visual capacity of the system to
satisfy the state’s parental observation requirement.
Teachers
also benefit from the technology of this school.Teaching
has become a highly rationalized and scientific activity.Years
of research establishing “best practice” has led to direct instruction
as automated and computer assisted.With
rare exceptions, students amass content knowledge through computer assisted
instruction and self paced learning. Teachers spend most of their
time assessing and evaluating and providing feedback to students.This
is done in a variety of ways.Each
student meets with a teacher for an hour each week and receives feedback
on their progress as well as suggestions for improvement.
As
with teachers, so to with administrators.There
are no principals any more.Research
between 2001 and 2015 was able to demonstrate that in effective schools
the concept of leadership density contributed more to student achievement
than the actions of a principal who was a strong instructional leader.Thus,
schools gradually began redefining the role of the principal into that
of a team member and supporter of the instructional staff.The
term now in vogue is that of Instructional Organizer and means to imply
this new understanding.The Instructional
Organizer is still responsible for assessing the impact of behavior on
student progress and thus is charged with monitoring all student behavior.The
architecture of Panopticon, as indicated
earlier, facilitates this function.
The
district’s superintendent carries out the evaluation of teachers and staff,
a process that is now heavily dependent upon assessing the relationship
of student progress to teacher monitoring activities.The
superintendent has complete records on each student and has well developed
software that indicates whether the students assigned to a given teacher
are progressing as predicted by their APGAR scores.
The
Problem
There
are elements of Panopticon that have already
come to pass.There are elements
of the case that may come to pass.Arrange
yourself in groups and identify those elements of the case that you would
like to see become part of the landscape of public education.Identify
as well those elements that you think would be destructive of public education
as you believe it should evolve over the next fifty years.
Questions
to ponder:
1)Should
high school learning become individualized?
2)Should
surveillance be a significant part of public high school education?
3)Should
technology be used to control or to liberate and if the latter, what limits
would you impose if any?
4)What
is the role of the teacher as technology makes it far easier to deliver
content via electronic means directly to students?
References
Astor,
R.A., Meyer, H., & Behre, W.(1999).Unowned
places and times: Maps and interviews about violence in high schools.American
Educational Research Journal.36,
n1, 3-42.
Bentham,
J. (1962). The works of Jeremy Bentham
(J. Bowring, ed.). New York: Russell and Russell.
Foucault,
M. (1979). Discipline & Punishment: The birth of the prison.
New York: Vintage Books.
Levy,
Michael. (1995). Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace: Power Through
the Panopticon.http://bliss.berkeley.edu/impact/students/mike/mike_paper.html
Lyon,
David.(1994).The
electronic eye: The rise of surveillance society.Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Orwell,
George. (1969)1984.New
York: Harcourt Brace
Zuboff, Shoshana.(1984).In
the age of the smart machine: The future of work and power.New
York: Basic Books.
Relevant
Information
By
David Enberg
In
1791, English philosopher Jeremy Bentham
proposed an architectural innovation designed to lead to safe, humane prisons.
He envisioned a prison space constructed as a circular array of inward-pointing
cells. Solid walls between the cells would prevent any communication between
prisoners, and a small window in the back of the cell would let in light
to illuminate the contents. At the center of the ring of cells, Bentham
placed an observation tower with special shutters to prevent the prisoners
from seeing the guards. This “all-seeing place,” or panopticon,
was designed to provide complete observation of every prisoner.
Bentham’s
central goal of the panopticon was control
through both isolation and the possibility of constant surveilance.
A prisoner will constrain his own behavior with the knowledge that some
guard may be observing every action, regardless whether anyone is watching
at a given moment. Bentham found this Utilitarian
ideal of oppressive self-regulation to be appealing in many other social
settings, including schools, hospitals, and poor houses, although he achieved
only limited success in promoting the idea during his lifetime.
Michel
Foucault seized on this idea of a controlling space and applied it as a
metaphor for the oppressive use of information in a modern disciplinary
society. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault observed that control no longer
requires physical domination over the body, but can be achieved through
isolation and the constant possibility of observation.
In
modern society, our spaces are organized “like so many cages, so many small
theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly
visible” (Foucault, 1979). We are seen without seeing our controllers—information
is available on us without any communication. Foucault realized that oppression
in the information age is no longer about physical domination and control,
but rather the potential for complete knowledge and observation. “Without
any physical instrument other than architecture and geometry, [the Panopticon]
acts directly on individuals; it gives ‘power of mind over mind.”
(Foucault,
1979) Physical intimidation is hardly even relevant in an information society
when people need to regulate their own behavior to escape the constant
threat of detection.
This
idea has since become the darling of postmodern cyber-libertarians, who
see the oppressive observation of corporate and governmental organizations
as the fulfillment of Foucault’s vision. The “all-seeing” comes in the
form of literal observation through cameras in public spaces and electronic
monitoring of workers, but it also has a more figurative element in the
data-monitoring of credit agencies and insurance companies. Their view
is that a society is being constructed where all behavior will be sharply
regulated through the fear of theoretical observation by some oppressive
entity.