Walter M. Haney

Walter M. Haney of Orleans, MA, formerly of Jamaica Plain and Westminster, MA died August 31, 2022. He was predeceased by his beloved wife Kristine (Votta) Haney, sister Deborah (Haney) Batten, brother-in-law Jim Votta, parents Walter Judson Haney and Grace (Kelly) Haney Hill as well as many very dear friends and colleagues, especially George Madaus and Richard Lawrence. He is survived by his daughter, Elizabeth Haney and her husband Michael Mirochnick as well as his sister Sarah Puterbaugh, brothers-in-law David Batten and Michael (June) Votta, sister-in-law Rita Votta, innumerable friends and students.

Walter was effervescent, generous, kind and a true character. He was accident prone and adventurous. Walter was born in Texas and raised in Michigan but lived most of his adult life in Massachusetts, getting degrees at Michigan State and Harvard along the way. He lived many lives—as a 13-year-old on-call bee swarm specialist for the East Lansing police, first mate on the sailing ship Brigantine Romance and International Voluntary Service volunteer.

When he was kicked out of IVS, Walt found work as a civil servant for the Royal Lao government. During this time off he photographed and interviewed many Laotian civilians who had survived the secret US bombing of their fields and homes. Walt wrote about these bombings in his own pamphlet "They Survived," and the Pentagon Papers upon his return to the US. Walter happened to return to Laos in April 1975, and ended up helping friends and colleagues escape prior to the communist takeover.

Walter was also a school board member and long serving library trustee for the Town of Westminster. He served as a professor in the Boston College Lynch School of Education. A pioneer in the use of children’s drawings as a gauge of their attitudes toward teachers and learning, Dr. Haney served the Lynch School for over 30 years. Walter published widely on testing and assessment issues in scholarly journals such as the Harvard Educational Review, Review of Educational Research, and Review of Research in Education and in wide-audience periodicals such as Educational Leadership, Phi Delta Kappan, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

In 2000, in collaboration with the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund's Al Kaufman, Walter helped to debunk the “Texas Miracle in Education,” an erroneous claim by the then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush that the test-score gap between white and minority students on the state's standardized tests had dramatically narrowed during his tenure. Walt's paper on the topic, titled “The Myth of the Texas Miracle,” revealed the systemic suppression of students of color to increase test scores. In an interview with the Washington Post, Walt said “What is happening in Texas seems to me to be not just an illusion, but from an educational point of view, an outright fraud.” His closing sentence in the study’s summary stated: “The Texas `miracle’ is more hat than cattle.”

Walter was an avid gardener and home horticulturist, reviving many friends’ orchids over the years. He supplied many friends with Haney Honey from hives he tended, but also loved summers on the Cape, clamming, fishing and making friends with neighbors.

Walt was overjoyed that his work documenting bombing in Laos contributed both to congressional investigations and to the work of the nonprofit Legacies of War in bringing justice for those atrocities. He worked tirelessly on his teaching and research on testing and evaluation and was especially proud of his work to dismantle the myth of the Texas miracle in education. He was also proud of his work using drawings in educational evaluation, inspired by the drawings that refugees had done of the U.S. bombings in Laos. He was a loving father, husband, brother, son, uncle, teacher and friend and will be sorely missed.

In lieu of flowers, please do any or all of the following: 1) Donate to and learn more about Legacies of War (https://www.legaciesofwar.org/), 2) Contact your MA legislators to fully fund and implement the Student Opportunity Act to fund education equitably in MA, or, 3) Plant flowers anywhere you can, especially in places where the rules don’t allow it.

The family would also especially appreciate you sharing any stories, adventures, anecdotes or photos of Walt. You can share these at: https://memories.net/timeline/walter-haney-77521