Peter Greene here rages against data walls, until he realizes that everyone should be subject to the se public shaming so they too can feel humiliated and outraged.
He writes;
“Suddenly I get it. Data walls aren’t just an indefensible abuse of children. They aren’t just a way to make school a bit more hostile and unpleasant, a way to shame and bully the most fragile members of our society. They’re also a way to acclimate children to a brave new world where inBloom et al track their data from cradle to grave and make it available to all sorts of folks. Where privacy is a commodity that only the rich can afford.
“Data walls are deeply and profoundly wrong. There is no excusable reason on God’s Green Earth for them to exist. They may represent a small battle in the larger reformy stuff war, but they are a direct assault on our students, and they should stop, now, today.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The best way for authoritarians to run people’s lives is to get them accustomed to not only not questioning controlling assumptions and behaviors but to assume that those assumptions and behaviors are beyond question, simply a given, part of the natural and divine order.
The trouble for tyrants starts when people like Peter Greene raise inconvenient questions and facts.
“I didn’t know I was a slave until I found out I couldn’t do the things I wanted.” [Frederick Douglass]
And what’s a very good way to come to that realization?
“Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.” [Frederick Douglass]
Thank you to Peter Greene and the owner of this blog and so many others for breaking the bonds of ignorance and obedience to unjust authority.
😎
I’m glad you discovered Peter Greene. Don’t know a thing about his early education, but he sure can write.
When there is an effort to make people doubt whether they can raise their own children, we have a problem. When there is an effort to cast doubt into the hearts and minds of people who genuinely want to help children discover and grow and learn because it is not all quantifiable, then there is a problem.
Those who do care and who love their children must stand up to this.
We must not doubt that we are good enough for this job DESPITE data. The balancing act of answering to the data mandates right now and offering what we know is best for children is certainly delicate. But those whose hearts are in the right place will prevail.
The self-consciousness of those who need data to justify everything they do need not be projected onto those who have the ability to trust their judgement and experience. They can certainly try (which they are), but those with good sense to know that we ARE good enough to raise our own children without a quantifiable score should keep doing so WITH CONFIDENCE.
You’re right; that is what it’s about, isn’t it.
Last year my dd2 had a math teacher who liked to pin to the board tests that were an A or better. I was a little taken aback; the omission seemed obvious enough; those without a test there would feel badly. But I cringed inside remembering my own school days because that would have mortified me as kids who were “brains” as was so disgustingly termed then, were really not liked at all. I would have done everything in my power to hide my good grades.
I’m not excusing this, just recalling this reality. I was wondering how things might have changed, pondered it and decided that hmmmm, maybe things have changed and for the better when teachers and the class culture celebrates academic success?
Here’s what belies this … my kid really is incredibly proud of her good grades and works very hard for it. She also cherishes things and really was upset that all year long she got none of her tests back (only those few she bombed!) — she was looking forward to receiving them back at the end of the year and probably gloating a bit about them in the privacy of her room.
But — I still, almost a year later, still cannot believe this — the teacher actually threw all those tests away. Threw them in the trash. Those tests that were supposed to be the glory of the kids. Those tests that were *theirs*.
My kid was in tears, depressed for days, still talks about it, still remembers it.
And the whole episode really belies any pretense that this is for or about the kids and their needs.
What it actually *is* for I’m not sure, but this suggestion from above, simply to acclimate them to a society where everything about them is counted, publicly … it’s about all I can come up with.
And now I’m mad all over again. I tried to find that teacher and give her a piece of my mind. But of course she skeedadles from school on the instant of the bell. I think I told the principal (with whom I have somewhat chatty relationship; not a formal complaint), but I don’t think he cared really.
What I can’t seem to convey properly is how deeply significant this *felt* to the kid. And I was mystified about the whole episode from stem to stern – really why it matters so much, etc.
To this end …. years back by a math teacher I actually respect, I was told through the kids that as Mother I was supposed to post the kids’ good grades.
Now, this is not something I would ever be inclined to do. To me, a grade is a spot-measurement reflecting incorporation of knowledge. It’s not really a focus, properly, of glory. You project what you’ve learned not by obtaining a grade or displaying it, but by conveying it advancement through social ability to interact and understand.
_But_ … what would I know after all? Maybe, I wondered, this is a reflection of some deficit of my own. Maybe I never give myself credit for stuff in part because of this little microcosmic unwillingness to stop and take a little pleasure and pride….
So — I thought, ‘OK, let’s try it. This is what the modern experts say to do to build self-esteem’. sigh. So I’ve done it, for a few years now, I’ve stuck the kids’ report cards onto a magnet on the fridge. Honestly, it still repulses me but a little less than before.
Does this exercise actually convey to them that I’ll love them still should ever something other than a B show up? I really doubt it. Their grades has zero to do with my regard for them … that’s not quite true. I am incredibly impressed with their scholarship. And I want to support what they want, and they clearly want good grades. But probably we’ve got something of a misunderstanding circle going around here. I wonder why they are so grade-driven as opposed to, say, knowledge- or content-driven. And who can wonder? Who is it who’s stuck those disgusting report cards up on the fridge all these years?
Because the thing is, — here’s a hallmark of every academic I’ve ever known. Good ones at least. The defining characteristic is – you feel like a fraud. Every second you feel you’ll wake up and someone will discover what a charlatan you are, what a fraud; that you don’t really know anything. Etc. And everyone I know runs as hard as they can — to stay in the same place ( 🙂 cf my avatar). And I do believe this comes inside somewhere from an inability to acknowledge some pride and recognition in what you have done so far. …
How do you combat that?
Do “data walls” address this? Do they celebrate achievement or slap you silly with unfeeling relentless comparisons? Whatever answer one comes up with, has to be consistent independent of where you are on the F-D-C-B-A scale. What does it do to post publicly your periodic point-assessments. (particularly when these point assessments are of questionable value anyway).
Here’s another thing I heard long ago — maybe it was Erma Bombeck I’m thinking! — on the subject of family-pride-nurturing. Someone or other said to me: boasting is not a good thing to be doing out and about town. But the family dinner table is an exception. This is the place you bring your feelings of pride and boastfulness. This is what Family is for, a place to confess what a good job you’ve done without approbrium for lack of modesty.
OK, that doesn’t sound like Erma Bombeck. And also, it sure doesn’t sound like my family dinner table growing up. But it seemed once at least, to be sensible. There has to be *someplace* to come to confess you’ve done a good job, eh?
Anyway, sorry for the lengthiness here — early morning and already I’ve screwed up big-time today so the subject seemed very relevant.
I don’t know how you nurture or sustain feelings of pride and achievement and development. But I don’t think public walls of these sorts of postings can be the answer. And my experience belies the claim that it is. When that teacher threw away my kids’ work, whatever boost she may have given by displaying her work, was quashed many steps back. It was all just a tool for exploiting my kids’ achievement to browbeat other kids with. No wonder the zeitgeist in the classroom is to “hate” kids who do well — their function is to slap those who haven’t done well. That’s what the high-achieving kids mean to the less-achieving ones. It’s a slap. My classmates 50 years ago knew this, that’s why they all hated “brains”. Not because they were not happy for us, but because our success was a tool in the kitbox of their own shame.
Disgusting.
I get grief from administrators for not having student work up on the walls. I tell them I don’t do that, for all the reasons you explain. Not to mention that I don’t have any room as my walls are filled with realia. Your daughter’s teacher may have an administrator breathing down his/her neck to do so.
Data has its place. But its current use in US schools is destructive and abusive. I know data walls real well.I taught in elementary schools for over three decades. Toward the end of it, the oppressive crush of meaningless and stifling data inspired me to create a teacher data shield, not to say “no data”, but simply to protect teachers, in the way a shield would protect warriors from assault in another violent time.
Print and pass out a few data shields at your next teacher meeting or deskilling session ( aka staff development), and see what happens. Be careful, though… http://TeacherDataShield.com
What’s a “Data Wall”?
Flerp I think they are more commonly called “Dashboards” and they’re very common as best practice on a company website. They show the statistics distinguishing that company.
So you can see how it is a business practice being pushed onto a school setting.
YUP. Dashboards. This whole data-driven deform movement is a carry-over from a revolution that occurred in the business world in the 1990s that gave us data-driven management (or analytics), KPIs, the Balanced Scorecard, and executive dashboards for displaying those.
But, as is typical in education, people half heard what was going on in the other field (business) and became hell-bent to put together evaluation systems that were, ironically, unidimensional in just the sort of way that Kaplan and Norton attacked in their justly famous Harvard Business Review article introducing the Balanced Scorecard. The whole point of Kaplan and Norton’s article is that single measures (like financials) are too narrow–that they are backward-looking, for example, and don’t take into account critical factors regarding customers, internal processes, and institutional knowledge and learning. The deformers compounded this problem of unidimensionality of measurement by choosing single measures (summative standardized test scores) that are extremely flawed measurements even of the limited stuff that they purport to measure. And so they invented “data-driven decision making” for schools, the latest instantiation of educational numerology.
It’s typical for education deform movements in the U.S. (and we’ve had many such) to have such a genesis. People pick up a tool from some other field (the factory, psychology, linguistics, business management), break the tool, and then start trying to use it for EVERYTHING.
Robert, excellent point about being backward looking.
I also think education is about individual pursuits. . .so while there are factors for rating the strength of an institution, the test score thing is one that has nothing to do with what the institution has to offer for student growth.
Robert, what an interesting history. Thank you! I know only of the silly “dashboard” on my laptop (apple). I had no idea this a business-world mantra. You do a terrific job articulating why the far more complex world of K12 education isn’t going to be a relevant rollover opportunity for that nevertheless-flawed model from that much simpler system.
Honestly, how can anyone think otherwise? Even without all the data that’s now accumulated showing that this model *isn’t working*….?
It’s a posting in the classroom (or in some other public space) of people’s scores.
Ah. I have one of those up in the living room. The family hasn’t complained much about it, according to the “Whining About the Board” column.
Other answers:
an obscenity
evidence that the teacher or administrator posting it is a backward cretin who abuses children and should not be allowed anywhere near them
They’re managers, not educators. It’s how an MBA would run a kindergarten classroom.
Like poor managers everywhere, they’ve applied “you can’t manage what you don’t measure” to data in classrooms in a dumb, rigid and obsessive way.
I’m not sure you’re going to reach ed reformers using the language of education. Try their language.
Try telling them the clients object to the public humiliation. See if that works 🙂
If the students are indeed “clients”. I can’t figure out if the kids are the customers or the employees in ed reform structure, honestly. I’m leaning “employee”.
What’s next? A data pillory?
data wall, data pillory, same thing
I retain hope that this will fall out of fashion, eventually, because there’s no joy in it.
Boy, is ed reform GRIM.
People will insist on bucking it, because that’s how people are 🙂
LOL
Indeed!
Maybe you’ve all seen this, but here’s a study on TFA’s role in privatizing public schools for you-all to ponder while taking down your data wall 🙂
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02680939.2014.880812?utm_content=buffer3d84c&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer#.UweUHPRdVH1
Data walls are the practice of displaying class and often individual student data on a wall or bulletin board in the classroom to show progress in meeting learning targets or performance goals. When individual student data is displayed, it should not be personally identifying.
I think discussing student progress, including reviewing data, in collaborative teacher PLC’s makes perfect sense. At a certain age, probably 6th grade or so, involving students in goal setting conversations can be valuable provided the goals are authentic and meaningful to the student and the teacher is experienced and thoughtful. But you do not need public data walls to do any of this.
This trend of classroom data walls strikes me as creepy and publicly shaming. Teachers and principals need to ask how this practice fits with their conscience and what exactly are they trying to accomplish with data walls.
What would lead a person to say, “I think discussing student progress, including reviewing data, in collaborative teacher PLC’s makes perfect sense…”
No, substituting “data” for specific information and insight in “PLC’s” doesn’t make “perfect sense”, and no actual humans I know talk like that. Our classes and learning environments are right there around us. Using a statistical lens to describe them is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope.
Our leadership team devoted quite a bit of time to discussing PLCs this week.
Teachers and administrators, as Duane has pointed out many times, have definitely been GAGAs in this area. I feel sad and frustrated that they take the flogging, but I do meet very bright teachers who say they like the information the data gives. We don’t have data analysts in schools, though, so it can be a huge consumer of time for teachers to go through all the scores and data to make it purposeful. To me the PLC and data obsession has got to be harnessed (if it has to be utilized) so that it does not detract so much instructional time (pair it with testing and mandated reforms have pretty much hollowed out the school day for children).
Data Walls are show and tell with a passive aggressive agenda.
chemtchr, I do not know if you are part of a chemistry or physical science team or whether you are the only chemistry teacher in your school. If you are part of a larger team, do you find it useful to review how students are doing in your class and on your common assessments? And also discuss what activities are working well, what techniques are working for students struggling to master a concept, and how to update units for the next year?
Motivation 101:
I was told that the children like to see the data walls. They’re suppose to use it as goal setting to improve. Please! What 9 year old loves to use data for anything other than using the crumpled piece of paper as target practice to shoot at the garbage can. The propoganda is ridiculous.
What, you didn’t sing and dance “data” as a kid: you know: data, data, data, data, la, de da, da de la, data da de la dat ata tada, etc. all the while jumping up and down next to your desk????
Its true. My kids love data walls. They often dream about them and they are usually in the top 3 requests on their holiday gift list.
At birthday parties we’ve deep sixed the donkey and blindfolded kids now get to pin the data on the wall.
LOL
Maybe politician and wall street cronies should be mandated to have data walls so people can see how they are screwing the country.
Diane, your comments crack me up. Seriously though, I agree with your decision not to publicly display student work. While this practice may motivate younger students to do better, the older, middle school students are not thrilled at all with sharing their achievements or lack of and I prefer individual conferencing with students. As for data walls…yes, these attempts by administration to have us post data on our bulletin boards was not for the benefits of students, but for the viewing of “outside visitors” coming into the school to conduct “learning walks.”. It was a dog and pony show and I grow ever more despondent with data. If I read or hear “using data to drive instruction” one more time, I might need a mini-vacation at a local “funny farm,” because I will be the one dancing on my desk singing your data song! Thank you for the humor.
Sorry, I meant Duane!
My classroom data wall is a bar graph shows public school teaching experience.
1 MMs = 1 year teaching experience’
The data table (not the graph) is shown below.
REFOMER (Years Teaching)
COLEMAN (0)
DUNCAN (0)
OBAMA (0)
KOPP (0)
KLEIN (0)
MURDOCH (0)
GATES (0)
KING (0)
TISCH (0)
CUOMO (0)
RHEE (2+)
When my students ask, I tell them that these are the people responsible for all the tests that they have to take. the good news is my students got to eat a lot of MMs.
Imagine if we all did this.
I attended a workshop sponsored by Pearson entitled “Data Driven Culture” and the end of the presentation was dedicated to how to make a data wall, with pictures of data walls and suggestions for strong data walls.
Data walls are the equivalent in education of the motivational posters put up by HR departments.
TEAMWORK
“There’s no i in Team”
The proper response to motivational posters and to data walls is parody.
MOTIVATION
“If you find this poster motivating, then the best work of which you are capable is probably something that we shall soon be able to get a machine to do.”
Data walls encourage unidimensional thinking, regimentation, standardization, teaching to the test, and grotesque distortions of curricula and pedagogical approaches.
The Education Deformers pride themselves on their applicaiton of business principles to education. Well, here are summarizes of several of Demings’s “14 points” for Total Quality Management (TQM):
8.”Drive out fear.”
10.”Eliminate slogans.”
11.”Eliminate management by objectives.”
Data walls violate all three of these principles.
Deming understood that people work best under conditions of autonomy and intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivation; that continuous improvement works from the bottom up, not from the top down; and that management by objective distorts and narrows, keeping people from seeing alternatives, possibilities, and other parts of the bigger picture.
The Data Wall has a cousin in the Production Quotas continually broadcast by the propaganda departments of all fascist regimes. Orwell mocked this sort of thing, which is common in totalitarian states, in his 1984.
From the Rheformish Lexicon:
1984 Public policy manual replete with tips for managing schools.
So, what’s the alternative? Well, there are many. One is Japanese-style lesson study that empowers and provides structure for teachers to subject their practice to ongoing critique and revision. Another is individualized learning via IEP plans, continually revisited and revised, for every student.
Data walls are the equivalent, in schools, of the production targets and achievements continually broadcast by every Fascist regime:
From George Orwell’s 1984:
“Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig iron. The Voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely.”
We could even re-write a fairy tale:
Data, data on the wall, who’s the smartest kid of all?”
And the data wall replied, “My child, you are so smart, a 4 so true. but your elbow partner, she’s just a data point smarter than you.”
LOL!
Since the pleas and experience of teachers across the nation have fallen on the deaf ears of das rheeformers, I have turned to mocking them at every opportunity.
And you do it so well!