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

[Pinky's Brain]

Is your perspective the one from someone who did his very best and still ended up on the bottom? Or from the perspective of a lazy bum who got good grades regardless, like most of us here?

It might work for selective education for the higher aptitude schools, but for comprehensive schools or the lower aptitude schools it's just going to demotivate those battling genetics and losing.

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.

Re:Old concept

[TheSync]

Indeed, this paper finds that 23% of the variance in educational attainment is due to heritability, and 41% is due to shared family environment. The heritability of education attainment is less than is typically found for cognitive outcomes (such as IQ) for young adults.

This brings back memories

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The old 99% claim...

[Gort65]

"I would say 99 percent of teachers see the benefit 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.

Re:The old 99% claim...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

When somebody is talking about an allegedly 'data-driven' mechanism, hearing such...quality...statistics being used in place of actual evidence is concerning.

That's what concerns me (both about that specific quote, and about the practice generally). Anyone who thinks that students aren't acutely aware of anything useful to the noble causes of shame and bullying without adult assistance is fooling themselves. The feral little bastards certainly are. And if they aren't, they'll invent something and carry on.

The trouble is that the current fads for 'accountability' and 'data driven' and similar buzzwords tend to be severely lacking in the sort of expertise required to actually represent an improvement. Statistics is a perfectly valid field; but without expertise and care it's just bullshit with error bars. And is anybody optimistic enough to suspect that the teachers most in need of improvement are the ones who were just waiting to set loose the power of their statistics degree, rather than doing some cargo-cult implementation of 'best practices'?

Doing statistically driven work (especially given the bottomless supply of confounding variables in the social sciences) isn't easy, so the odds are less than inspiring when you see an educational fad that (allegedly) brings The Power Of Statistics to classrooms whose teachers are in dire need of reform. You really think that the teachers you are worried about are proficient in statistics? Or that the teachers who are proficient or better in statistics are the ones you need to worry about?

Kids need to understand why

[fermion]

I recall talking about 'time outs' for young kids. Using this as a punishment, some people think, is silly, but using it as a way to manage a child can be very useful. For instance, the behavior charts that provide immediate visual feedback to younger students is well understood and can be very useful in fulfilling the need of such children for concrete and fair feedback.

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.

What's the problem?

[ahabswhale]

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.

Another brick in the wall?

[camg188]

That album was released 35 years ago.
Quit making me feel old.

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).

[insert unacceptable vernacular here]

[hiryuu]

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.

Re:[insert unacceptable vernacular here]

[thegarbz]

And maybe it will force the top rungs to turn competitive, because ... well that's what actually happens with the top run of students? Also the lower rungs will figure this out anyway when they get their report cards and maybe scolded by their parents. If you're on the lower rung, chances are you're already being publicly shamed as a troublemaker by the teacher (remember the dunce cap). If they fail because they are compared to other students, they have no chance anyway.

Personally I think this is a good idea, but then I'm also not a fan of the no-child-left-behind type schooling which has plagued the western world as of late.

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.

Re:Data Walls are a way to identify Crappy Teacher

[Mr. Slippery]

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.

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.

Negative reinforcement

[rsilvergun]

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.

Private Data Walls Work

[enderwig]

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.

Holyoke

[sunking2]

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.

InBloom

[Jason Levine]

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.

Re:Naked Posture Photos

[BradMajors]

http://www.sfgate.com/news/art...

"the photographs were taken by W. H. Sheldon, who believed there was a relationship between body shape and intelligence and other traits."