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."

Comments

Old concept

[murdocj]

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.

Re:Old concept

[ceoyoyo]

The evidence for genetic determination of academic performance is very weak. There's probably an effect, but not much of one. Socio-economic status of the parents is the major statistical factor. However, the intra-individual variance is large, showing that anybody can do well or poorly regardless of predisposing factors.

FERPA - This is not legal; also poorly conceived

[DonDavis]

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).

Data Walls are a way to identify Crappy Teachers

[McGruber]

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.