Sarah
Jaffe in Salon
Agustin Morales’s first day back at school came a
little bit late this year. On November 24, he began his fourth year as English
teacher at Maurice A. Donahue Elementary School in Holyoke, Massachusetts, to
congratulations from his students and colleagues.
Morales had to fight to return to school at all this
year. As Salon reported
in October, he was let go last spring, after his evaluations took a sudden turn
at about the same time as he joined fellow teachers and parents to protest
so-called “data walls” in the classroom; teachers had been instructed to post
students’ names and test scores on a public wall as a motivation tactic. Parent
Paula Burke called the walls “public humiliation.”
