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All In All, Kids Just Another Brick In the Data Wall
theodp writes "If you don't have kids of school age, you may not be aware that Data Walls — typically a low-tech "dashboard" of color-coded sticky notes on a wall bearing the names of pupils to highlight their achievement level, absences, or discipline problems — are apparently quite the rage. This is much to the chagrin of some teachers, including Peter A. Greene, who rails against the walls-of-shame in Up Against the Data Wall. Why stop there, Greene asks, tongue-in-cheek. Why not have data-driven dress codes? Data-driven recess? Pooh-poohing concerns of teachers who think Data Walls are mean but feel pressure to create them, the Supt. of Holyoke Public Schools said, "It's not a mandate whatsoever." Still, he went on to add, "I would say 99 percent of teachers see the benefit of it," which some might take as an implicit mandate. In other student privacy news, New York's Supreme Court has ruled that parental permission is not required to disclose student data to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded inBloom, perhaps paving the way for the Great Data Wall of the U.S."
When I went to school, exam scores were literally posted on the wall. Everyone's score, there in black & white, with their name next to it. That was how you found out how you did. It wasn't considered a crime against humanity at that time.
WTF?
Data wall by Dolores Umbridge.
Grades were private, but everyone knew who got the good grades and who got the bad grades, thus defining the middle as well.
I had my name on a literal wall of trouble-makers in elementary school. IIRC, about a dozen construction-paper pouches with citations in them. This didn't scar me or anything. It was just one facet of the insanity that came from growing up before anybody had heard of ADHD or Asperger's (I read more like an Asperger's case even though I was never diagnosed). This was back in the 70s. The wall neither hurt nor helped. Switching schools and slowly learning how to socialize via hard knocks and soft advice... that helped; but you never totally grow out of it.
Not damning the point that the Supt. of Holyoke Public Schools made or supporting it, but I tend to distrust anyone who claims that 99% of a group supports their side to bolster their argument. I know, figure of speech, but still indicative... at least 99% of the time.
not that it's stuff that matters at all unless touting billionerror stuck deals
With data walls, viewable to kids, they have to understand what they mean. I can tell you even fro adults some data walls are incomprehensible. Simply posting data and using it rank students or whatever is quite meaningless. If data is going to be used to help students meet a goal, then the best way to do that is on a individual basis. Use the data to choose lesson to help the individual students improve. Part of this is the administration providing tools to direct the data toward student improvement instead of student or teacher punishment.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Parents data wall the teachers and staff?
I don't see the issue here. It's not like the students don't know who the smart and dumb kids are. Also, I think this could be a benefit if every teacher did it. If you have a class where everyone's struggling, it's a clue that you might need to adjust the material or address the teacher's skills.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
That album was released 35 years ago.
Quit making me feel old.
This might work in Japan or Korea where obedience to authority is paramount, but not in the westernized world. In this part of the world, where children don't receive the additional tuition available to Japanese/Korean students, it will simply be a daily reminder of their failure with all the attendant emotional problems. It enforces teaching for the test, and relieves teachers from the task of making education a varied, practical and hands-on experience.
After each class, the kids can put a thumbs up or thumbs down next to a teachers name for performance, comportment, engagement, and subject knowledge. Give the other students the chance to make informed decisions about whether to opt out of their class or switch schools.
In Canada at least you can rate your teacher to see who is performing and who isn't.
http://ca.ratemyteachers.com/
It is not legal to publicly display students' grades. It's part of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). A teacher could lose his license for sharing a student's grade with others. It seems that 'achievement level' should fall under that as well. This shows a poor understanding of behavior. Those students who might struggle will now be more motivated to act out or fail outright (rather than seem to struggle and fail).
So, against all tradition here, I R'd the FA, and saw the photos posted. My first reaction on seeing those data wall examples was "good gawd, some moron took the overly-simplistic KPI dashboard so common in the corporate environment and decided to put it in use in early grade school." The data behind this tool may be more meaningful - which is a completely separate debate, in regards to the efficacy of standardized testing, etc. - but if the usage of this tool is shaming, then it's going to do more harm than good. Word-of-mouth comparisons of GPA and such were harsh enough in high school, but putting this right up there for a five-year-old (and all his classmates) to see is just going to make the kids on the lower rungs see it as defining and thus leading it to become self-fulfilling. Some will withdraw, others will become frustrated and lash out, and all of it will fail to be helpful.
This is dumb.
Karma: Excellent, but still won't get you laid.
My partner is an elementary school principal. Her school has a small "data room", only accessed by teachers, in which she has posted "data walls". Her data walls are actually printouts of very large spreadsheets -- each row is a child, and the hundred of columns represent individual concepts that children have to master. For example, one column might represent "being able to add fractions", another might represent "being able to subtract fractions", another might be "being able to correctly conjugate verbs", etc.
The really cool thing is that these spreadsheets are generated (by software) after the children take computerized tests. Instead of just giving a numeric score, the software will show exactly *which* concepts the child does and does not know.
You would think teachers would love this technology because it would allow them to focus their instruction time on concepts their students have not mastered. Sadly, that's not the case -- instead, many long-time teachers who had always gotten "good" and "excellent" evaluations are suddenly being shown that they are not actually very good teachers. For example, the software can easily show that *none* of the students in a particular classroom have mastered a particular concept, such as adding fractions. If no student in that particular elementary classroom is able to add fractions, then it is pretty obvious that the teacher in that classroom does not know how to effectively teach adding fractions. Hearing that is pretty threatening to a teacher who has taught the same way for two or three decades.
Anyway, I posted because what the article calls a "data wall" is not really a data wall.
Can someone explain how this is not a wholesale violation of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act?
Not quite. The software can easily show that none of the students in a particular classroom passed a section of some test. But whether that test actually measures the ability to (e.g.) add fractions, is another question.
Quantifying things is easy. You can do it with a random number generator. Quantifying things in a meaningful and useful way is hard.
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You cannot wash away blood with blood
We had a wall of shame 30 some odd years ago in grade school. Trouble was some of us decided to see who could max out the 'shame'.
It's a wall of data.
Like every other wall of data out there, it's utility depends on the data being used, but a useless wall of data does not cease to be a wall of data.
there's a lot of studies that show that once people develop a negative self image that they tend to take actions that reinforce that self image, often without realizing their doing it. i.e. if a person thinks they're dumb they become unable to do anything smart. This is where the "Precious Little Snowflake" movement came from. You praise kids even if they're not doing very well because if you don't they don't just get discouraged, they quickly come to believe that success is impossible and subconsciously sabotage themselves.
American Puritanicalism runs counter to this. The idea there is that adversity breeds character. I'm inclined to disagree with this. What I mostly see is adversity wears people down. The problem is that people who've been crushed at best fade away quietly and at worst end up in prison. Either way they're marginalized. The few that survive and prosper are much more visible. The phenomenon's called survival bias.
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FWIW, I am a public high school physics teacher who has taught physics to the bottom half and top half of the student population. The school I teach at is majority minority with a population that identifies as Caucasian at around 30% and African-American around 40%.
Nearly ALL students (and teachers for that matter) would like to see how they rank against others. Nearly all students also want their exact rank to be a secret. Highest grade, lowest grade, highest average or lowest average does not matter. One of the skills I had to learn was how to DISCRETELY pull struggling students aside to give them pep talks and advice on what they could do to improve their grades.
The struggling kids are shamed even if they publicly tell everyone they are ranked 99 out of 100. Adding another bad grade is just another poke at an open wound. ACTING stupid is okay if everyone thinks you are smarter than you look. No one wants to BE stupid. By being discrete, I've gotten quite a few that would do work for me.
I've also had to learn when and how to give kudos to the top achievers. For honor students, its a competition. Unless you are in the top 3, there is some shame associated to being "only" 5th. Knowing someone's rank is a little bit like knowing someone's true name in fantasy universes: there is some power in that knowledge.
Dealing with teenagers is like the super-position principle: it works until it doesn't.
The worst performing school district in the state. So it doesn't surprise me they are trying just about anything. It's also a major distribution point for most of the heroin in New England.
When I went to school, each young female student was required to strip naked, and allow a group of eugenicists, from foundations like those that Bill Gates works tirelessly to promote, to take intimate photographs of every part of their body. (Google 'Ivy-league nude posture photo scandal' if you don't believe me). This was just how new students were processed. It wasn't considered a crime against humanity at that time.
See how I use the same VILE PROPAGANDA methods of 'murdocj' to justify (by implication) an appalling abuse of Human Rights and dignity. And of course, the owners of Slashdot ensure 'murdocj's pro-Gates propaganda gets scored '5'.
When terrifying and sobbing young women were stripped and photographed by racist monsters like Sheldon, it most certainly WAS a crime against Humanity. When kids are mortified and humiliated by having their test scores contrasted with those of the rest of the class, it most certainly is a crime against Humanity. Teaching should be about bringing out the best in each individual. Many people are put off from exercise for life, for instance, by the abusive PE regimes at school that 'mock' the less able at sports.
Feeling stupid makes a kid 'stupid'- every decent teacher knows this. For most people, confidence and happiness is the only route to effective learning. Yes, the most able in any subject or ability usually have a vicious and ruthless ability to drive themselves, but such people learn with or without decent external teaching. The ordinary student of any subject (not the top 10% or whatever) is very vulnerable to all kinds of factors, and best practices in teaching will be highly sympathetic to the psychology of the averagely able.
Next: kids intentionally underperforming so as not to be listed as one of the high achievers on the data wall.
My wife and I have been fighting against InBloom in NY for quite awhile. They're planning on taking our kids' data (like grades, medical information, IEP status, etc) and upload it to an Amazon Cloud Server.
My three problems are:
1) It's not opt-in or even opt-out. We can outright state that we don't want our kids' data uploaded and they can just ignore us and upload it anyway.
2) Cloud server security isn't absolute. How long until it is hacked?
3) InBloom is reserving the right to sell the data to third parties who might be interested in it.
InBloom is a horrible idea. The only reason it is moving forward is that the New York state Department of Education has bought into the Gates Foundation's lobbying efforts.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Not quite. The software can easily show that none of the students in a particular classroom passed a section of some test. But whether that test actually measures the ability to (e.g.) add fractions, is another question.
Quantifying things is easy. You can do it with a random number generator. Quantifying things in a meaningful and useful way is hard.
To be fair, it's not *that* hard. If your test has a set of questions asking the students to add fractions and they get them all wrong that does tell you something useful. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good and quite a bit better than the alternatives:
-Raise your hand if you know fractions. Good! 100% knowledge.
-This psychic is here to assess your ability to add fractions.
-You were here the day I explained adding fractions so you must know it.
-I don't know how to be absolutely certain you know fractions so why bother.
When I was in school (later half of the 90s and earlier half of the 00s) they had the walls but downplayed. For one it was a printout on a wall and two it was listed by student ID number. You might be able to pick up someone else's number but it was a basic level of obfusication.
I would like to take the opportunity to point out that the article is dead wrong on one specific point. In New York, the highest court is the Court of Appeals, not the Supreme Court proof.
- "Nobody came out that night, not one was ever seen. But Old Man Stauf is waiting there, crazy sick and mean!"
You would think teachers would love this technology because it would allow them to focus their instruction time on concepts their students have not mastered
I'm pretty sure most folks who rail against this are of the very valid opinion that the books and tests themselves are not indicative of intelligence or success (other than by making it so because those who fail are made to think they're failures).
If the test is bad, metrics pointing out how badly some classes or students do on the test are besides the point.
The endgame is to privatize school - and push us back into the medieval times when only the rich could afford good schools (Which don't participate in this kind of joke of assessment), and the rest of the schools had little to no funding because they're pressured to constantly improve scores while the public is pressured to "lower spending" so we can spend our taxes on bridges to nowhere or the next big war (which really puts all that money into the military industrial complex)
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
When the exam was handed back to us to be signed by our parents, it was given in reverse order of notation. So bad note first, good note last. This added the benefit that the shame was not permanent (having it on the wall) but at the same time made sure our parents were aware of our school progress.
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A friend of mine got a job at the school district office. My transcript, the "permanent record" of my mis-spent youth seems to have been misplaced. I've always wondered if the NSA worker was able to microfilm it before it disappeared.
1) Based on teachers I know and have discussed this with (yes, yes, not a valid sample, blah blah blah...) I can't imagine that the 99% stat quoted is anywhere near accurate. Many teachers have problems with posting student data, especially in elementary school where I teach.
2) I can't think of one instance during my career where comparing "achievement levels" or anything like them have motivated the lower performing kids, the ones that the NCLP, RTTT, and other government programs say we are supposed to be helping by "analyzing and sharing data with kids". What I have seen happen over and over is jealousy and hatred formed for higher kids in the class, and the lowering of self-image and tendency to give up for the lower kids (not the ones scoring poorly because they are not really trying, but the ones who truly need help).
This practice is certainly the rage among administrators who don't actually have to deal with kids though.
I am not sure about Common Core, but the rest of this is a lie. There is no inbloom 'database' that has a master record of all student that is malarky. Their source code is out there on Github. The agencies that control the data namely education agencies each manage, control, and create repositories of information that they control. . inbloom does not provide 3rd party access looking at their Term and Conditions. In addition, if you look at their actual data service product (open source), the data is encrypted to inbloom. They can't actually manipulate or see the data because the key to "see" the data is controlled by the educational agency. So the whole thing about a cross-reference database that bill gates and rupert murdoch are going to use is complete bunk. Look at the code man it tells you what they can do with it. I am assuming that the Murdoch reference is due to them using a consulting company that he owned to help build the product. I am not sure that means that conspiracy is lurking around the corner. I can't speak to Bill Gates or Murdoch's intentions, but inbloom at least seems to be doing the right thing. Now how they will be used is up for debates, but that is a matter to discuss with education agencies. I am a Java Developer and I have looked over their source code and played in their sandbox area. This data sharing thing with them is just plain not true.
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So much of the discussion of schooling misses the deeper point about the horrible legacy of "Prussian Schooling" and the enormous cost of it in diminished psyches. More humane lternatives are possible.
From the first link above: ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... .""
-------
"From Degrading to De-Grading"
"You can tell a lot about a teacher's values and personality just by asking how he or she feels about giving grades. Some defend the practice, claiming that grades are necessary to "motivate" students. Many of these teachers actually seem to enjoy keeping intricate records of students' marks. Such teachers periodically warn students that they're "going to have to know this for the test" as a way of compelling them to pay attention or do the assigned readings - and they may even use surprise quizzes for that purpose, keeping their grade books at the ready.
Frankly, we ought to be worried for these teachers' students. In my experience, the most impressive teachers are those who despise the whole process of giving grades. Their aversion, as it turns out, is supported by solid evidence that raises questions about the very idea of traditional grading.
1. Grades tend to reduce students' interest in the learning itself.
2. Grades tend to reduce students' preference for challenging tasks.
3. Grades tend to reduce the quality of students' thinking.
4. Grades aren't valid, reliable, or objective.
5. Grades distort the curriculum.
6. Grades waste a lot of time that could be spent on learning.
7. Grades encourage cheating.
8. Grades spoil teachers' relationships with students.
9. Grades spoil students' relationships with each other.
Most of us are directly acquainted with at least some of these disturbing consequences of grades, yet we continue to reduce students to letters or numbers on a regular basis. Perhaps we've become inured to these effects and take them for granted. This is the way it's always been, we assume, and the way it has to be. It's rather like people who have spent all their lives in a terribly polluted city and have come to assume that this is just the way air looks - and that it's natural to be coughing all the time.
Oddly, when educators are shown that it doesn't have to be this way, some react with suspicion instead of relief. They want to know why you're making trouble, or they assert that you're exaggerating the negative effects of grades (it's really not so bad - cough, cough), or they dismiss proven alternatives to grading on the grounds that our school could never do what others schools have done.
The practical difficulties of abolishing letter grades are real. But the key question is whether those difficulties are seen as problems to be solved or as excuses for perpetuating the status quo. The logical response to the arguments and data summarized here is to say: "Good heavens! If even half of this is true, then it's imperative we do whatever we can, as soon as we can, to phase out traditional grading." Yet many people begin and end with the problems of implementation, responding to all this evidence by saying, in effect, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, but we'll never get rid of grades because . .
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
My partner is an elementary school principal. Her school has a small "data room", only accessed by teachers, in which she has posted "data walls". Her data walls are actually printouts of very large spreadsheets -- each row is a child, and the hundred of columns represent individual concepts that children have to master. For example, one column might represent "being able to add fractions", another might represent "being able to subtract fractions", another might be "being able to correctly conjugate verbs", etc.
The really cool thing is that these spreadsheets are generated (by software) after the children take computerized tests. Instead of just giving a numeric score, the software will show exactly *which* concepts the child does and does not know.
You would think teachers would love this technology because it would allow them to focus their instruction time on concepts their students have not mastered. Sadly, that's not the case -- instead, many long-time teachers who had always gotten "good" and "excellent" evaluations are suddenly being shown that they are not actually very good teachers. For example, the software can easily show that *none* of the students in a particular classroom have mastered a particular concept, such as adding fractions. If no student in that particular elementary classroom is able to add fractions, then it is pretty obvious that the teacher in that classroom does not know how to effectively teach adding fractions. Hearing that is pretty threatening to a teacher who has taught the same way for two or three decades.
Anyway, I posted because what the article calls a "data wall" is not really a data wall.
I think what you're describing is very valuable but I'm still not convinced it needs to be put up where the students themselves can see it.
With the children's names removed, with visibility to the parents and school board perhaps.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial