Youtube activism

Nancy Flanagan, a member of the Teacher Leaders Network, pointed me to this YouTube video by a North Carolina special ed teacher. Fed up with the contradiction between NCLB’s stated goal of all children meeting state standards by 2013 and the state’s norm-referenced (i.e. bell-curved) test, he decided to speak up.

As he expected, he was suspended and asked to resign. Nancy wonders,

[I]s this sweet, shambling guy in a T-shirt the person we want telling our story, explaining the paradoxes of teaching, testing and caring about kids? Doug doesn’t seem to be grandstanding, and this video is not what you’d call impressive rhetoric or razor-sharp analysis. Still, he seems like a regular guy, telling a common sense tale of frustration driving him to definitive action.

The video interests me less because of its connection to last month’s test-refusal stories than because it makes me speculate about the amazing potential of a highly democratic medium like YouTube as a forum for teacher activism. I’m sure it doesn’t all have to be the kind of activism that gets you fired.

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