This is an astonishing post by Julian Vasquez Heilig. He has a passion for equity, and he bridles when reformers lower the standards for becoming a teacher and claim they are doing it “for the kids.”
He asks, Would you rather fly with an experienced pilot or fly with one who had only five weeks’ training? Or how about one with 30 hours of training? If the answer seems obvious, and if you prefer that your children have teachers who are well prepared and highly qualified, wait until you see the chart in the middle of his post, showing the explosive growth in teachers with alternate certification.
Then consider that the U.S. Department of Education wants to STOP collecting this data. And that’s not all. In the Department’s single-minded commitment to something-or-other (not equity), this is what they propose to stop reporting:
“That brings us to the federal governments request to no longer keep track of this huge influx of teachers with a modicum of training to “pilot” our classrooms. The Department of Education is seeking public comments on the Civil Rights Data Collection process for 2013-2016. The feds have decided that it is no longer necessary to keep track of the FTE of teachers meeting all state licensing/certification requirements. The feds have also decided these data points are also no longer important for Civil Rights:
“Number of students awaiting special education evaluation (LEA)
“Whether students are ability grouped for English/Math
“Harassment and bullying policies (LEA)
“Number of students enrolled in AP foreign language(disaggregated by race, sex, disability, LEP)
“Number of students who took AP exams for all AP courses enrolled in (disaggregated by race, sex, disability, LEP)
“Number of students who passed AP exams for all AP courses enrolled in (disaggregated by race, sex, disability, LEP
“Total personnel salaries”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The FEDs need to GET A LIFE! They are well…fill in the blanks. Plus they are evil and greedy, and egads…DO THEY GET “OFF” spying on others? Must be; they have destroyed this country and now want to do even more dasdardly deeds. I thought I had the right to pursue life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Aint much life nor liberty and any pursuit of happiness. Where’s ENLIGHTENMENT? Ooops can’t measure that.
First we criticize because the govt wants to expand data collection, now we criticize because it wants to cut back. Of course, the data to be cut are the data that can be used to show that the corporate ed reformers are failing to improve student achievement while skimming our public funds into their private portfolios. Back under bush II, the right wing also wanted to make the ethnicity/race data impossible to use for research, thus taking away a tool to show that the nclb was not working. But they went the other direction–instead of not collecting ethnicity and race data, they were going to create some huge number of selections, thus making the data meaningless.
Collecting data for the sake of information is good.
Collecting it to punish and reward students, teachers, and principals is not good.
Using data of limited value as sticks and carrots produces skewed data
Collecting anonymous data is fine. Personal data is not.
Why are they limiting the collection of (somewhat) useful aggregate data while expanding the level of personally identifiable academic and behavioral data on our children?
Conveniently changing the FERPA privacy law allows all of this data to get into the NCES and “researchers” hands without parental consent.
Question: how can a federal government that is lending critical support to the charterite/privatizer movement stop providing powerful mathematical support to the defenders of public schools?
Answer: you deprive numbers/stats experts like Dr. Mercedes Schneider and Dr. Bruce Baker, GF Brandenburg and Gary Rubinstein, and others like Jersey Jazzman, of much of the data they need to provide convincing critiques of the education establishment.
That way the edufrauds can indulge themselves more freely in what they fail to understand was an admonitory observation by Mark Twain: “Facts are stubborn,but statistics are more pliable.”
Go figure.
🙂
Exactly. Arne has signaled to his hedge fund friends they can breath easy. He & his DoEd aren’t planning to do any oversight. They hear: “Do what you want with those kids because you’ll keep getting govt. contracts, grants & and tax breaks for your innovative disruptions. We only pretend to care about education quality when we are preparing press releases.”
once again, you all get so focused on policy you forget that this is all about doublethink and what the Ministry of Truth is sending down the memory hole! (1984)
Of course they’re NOT going to collect data that is actually useful! The last thing anyone needs is to have a clue how many Wendy Kopps have been employed at 150k or 250k a year!! How else are Arne & Rahm & Cory & their cronies gonna suck the marrow out of the bones and be first in line for the caviar?
Part of the badass teacher group growing pains has come from teachers who have more … tepid … definition of ‘badass’ than mine, and who are uncomfortable with people like me say – this memory hole stuff makes sense, when you consider the lies which are the foundation of the Rhee-former policies.
By the way – I hope you could see the snark in my opening comments. It is a LOT easier for me to be rude and blunt when I can point to the GREAT work people do on this blog discrediting the disreputable.
rmm.
Rmurphy, Wendy Kopp collects about $350,000 a year.
RttBotB strikes again …
Race to the Back of the Bus …
I agree with Diane, data should be collected to inform not as a hammer over teachers head to bully or fire them. If the Ed department doesn’t want to do this,what good are they!
Why on earth would they stop collecting this data? It’s not exactly hard data to collect – and on the flip-side – this is the actual non-subjective data that lets us look at some issues in schools.
On the other hand they’re hell bent on collecting data that’s subject to heavy bias.
Now, this COULD be a good thing if it was about say removing a lot of paperwork for schools – but that’s not what I’m seeing here. I don’t hear that the reporting requirements for these types of things as being the ones that are a massive administrative time suck.
Why would you remove data that actually can’t be manipulated very easily over the data that changes every single year that it’s collected due to shifting metrics?
Yet another case of those calling for accountability meaning it only applies if it refers to unionized teachers or schools slated for closure. The powers that be don’t want the public to learn the truth about the effects of their bully-like decision making. I just found out yesterday (http://nepc.colorado.edu/blog/its-test-score-season) that D.C. and some states, who so loudly proclaim miraculous improvements, won’t release the data that supports their claims.
Am I the only one thinking that some of the proposed ‘new’ data items could be influenced by a number of the items up for elimination? Silly me, it might possibly be informative to have both and look for any patters/relationships. You know, personnel expenditures compared to discipline incidents, or maybe even look at existence of harassment/bullying policies compared to discipline and removals. Personnel salaries compared to number of students enrolled in distance courses. Oh, well, I don’t know much about stats- I’m just a teacher.
Wasn’t one the reasons faux pwogwessive politicians supported NCLB because it called for the collection and disaggregation of this type of data?
I guess it was only collected to be used as a weapon against urban public schools and their teachers, to be discarded after it had served its purpose, and before it could be used to analyze their replacements.