Thanks to successful lobbying by representatives of higher education, the Obama administration has backed away from one of its loopiest ideas: rating every college and university in the nation.
No one loves Big Data more than the U.S. Department of Education. No federal agency understands less about the limitations of Big Data than the U.S. Department of Education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It isn’t over Diane.
They Will still collect the data, Then use it as a “consumer marketing tool”.
This is the proverbial camels nose in the tent. They will have the data still. It will still implicitly push their goals. It could still eventually be used for high-stakes decisions.
Half of a bad deal is still a bad deal. Information can’t hurt is the idea but what is measured and how it is measured will still produce their desired outcomes.
LikeLike
Speaking of data collection. Did you catch the Today show segment where a Mom sent in a copy of a form she was required to fill out to register her child for kindergarten. The form asked if the child was delivered natural or by cesarean section.
LikeLike
I was asked to fill out a lot of forms, some with with very personal questions, when my daughter was getting a special ed. evaluation this spring. I was appalled and left the one you mention and all other inappropriate questions blank. No one said a word to me. They shouldn’t even be asking…
LikeLike
OMG! Ridiculous.
LikeLike
You are right that they probably don’t need all the information they ask for, but in doing a case evaluation, they look for possible correlations between stressful events and any possible disabilities. Perhaps there is a school psychologist out there who can explain the rationale better.
LikeLike
Too bad the public school organizations didn’t have the political forttiude to push back when the “reform” movement started their report cards and such.
LikeLike
Thomas,
The Network for Public Education is creating its own report card. Stay tuned.
LikeLike
This is exactly what we need. Thank you!
LikeLike
Did a report card a long time ago on support of arts education in federal and state policies using data from the National Bureau of Educational Statistics. The process can be addictive. That exercise was never published but it did raise some eyebrows and pushed others in the direction of illustrating the landscape of public policy in arts education with stats.
Be sure to get some first-class info-graphics to go with that tool.
LikeLike
Wonderful idea, Diane! I can’t wait to see it!
LikeLike
Doesn’t U.S. News rank colleges anyway? Would the USDoE method be significantly different? (I’d ask if it would be any more valid, but that would be a stupid question.)
LikeLike
I believe the USDoE wanted lots more data on “outcomes” such as job placement and salaries, all neatly broken down by majors, etc.
LikeLike
Which would have inevitably closed down every discipline and department in college that actually gets young people to think, reflect, examine, argue and evaluate; in other words it eliminates the true core value of a college education.
If we allow them to succeed, any majors not deemed “STEM” or “Business Administration” will be gone forever.
Which is foolish but also quite ironic, since there aren’t enough jobs in STEM fields or business administration NOW; let alone 20 years from now when software is writing the code for software and robots using nanotechnology are performing surgery better than the most skilled and gifted doctors in the world.
LikeLike
Communication Workers of America appear to be abandoning Clinton for Sanders. I think that is also good news for the public sector.
LikeLike
I remember YEARS ago when talking to one of the finest minds in education in our school district and we were talking about evaluations.
He said, regarding one of the outstanding professors in his field
“Who has the expertise to evaluate me”?
Now we know
The most ignorant but self righteous of our politicians.
LikeLike
No truer words were ever spoken:
“No one loves Big Data more than the U.S. Department of Education. No federal agency understands less about the limitations of Big Data than the U.S. Depaartment of Education.”
LikeLike
Arne Duncan has consistently followed the policies of Bill Gates in his push for stack rating everything in sight.
For higher education some new metrics from USDE were supposed to show “best value education” meaning cost versus payoff for graduates in paychecks–return on investment. The policy was marketed as being “transparent” for the benefit of customers of education. Even without formal requirements from USDE, the governors in more than one state are pushing for the same thing. Ohio’s Kasich is among them, but he wants evidence of economic payoffs for Ohio.
This “economic outcomes only” philosophy will turn many public institutions of higher education into something like trade schools, kill off studies in the arts and humanities, tank basic research, and take the short-term political gain from this “transformative strategy” pretending there are no historically informed and valid sources of information on the benefits produced by these institutions, not just economic.
The virtues of the university as a vibrant source of new knowledge have been channeled into the business of learning to be an entrepreneur, doing the elevator pitch, getting the business plan in place and getting capital for a start up and go for it, then do your deals. Lots of very wealthy people and some fantastic achievements have come from this way of looking at the value of higher education. Donald Trump knows this drill, flaunts it, runs for President on it. Meanwhile the university as a reservoir of uncommon knowledge and expertise, well spring of new knowledge, and safe haven for learning what others have thought (and why), learning to question what you think, and learning what life may offer beyond a job–all of that is being portrayed as a lost cause.
That lost-cause view is evident in The American Enterprise Institute’s recent publication: “An Education Agenda for 2016: Conservative Solutions for Expanding Opportunity.” This 92 page report is telling its audience to ridicule “traditional” college curricula, tenured faculty, and middle class college students who “graduate from college completely unprepared to deal with the hazards, hassles, inconveniences, and disappointments of the real world.”
The report recommends that politicians stereotype college educators, say that they “see their students as mere children who are to be protected from the adult word, including through the use of strictly enforced, politically correct speech codes.”
The report freely recommends that colleges and universities be described as expensive venues that “offer whatever educational programs their tenured faculty are willing and able to teach, regardless of actual workforce needs.”
This is the attack language of persons who are among the intellectual elite in our nation.
They have learned that it works. There are no penalties for being rude, crude, and shortsighted and also a graduate of Harvard, Yale, Brandeis, Dartmouth, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, or Notre Dame. Just throw out this stereotyping language to dismantle public education.
The bios of the authors of this agenda indicate that, collectively, they attended seventeen different universities. Seven of these are public.
I am not certain that there are any voices left to be advocates for aims in higher education broader than an immediate payoff in paychecks. It is clear that one of the major conservative solutions for expanding “opportunity” to be in charge of education policy is to use a bully pulpit of privilege to demean the work of faculty and public colleges and universities.
Bottom line: The intellectual elite are marketing anti-intellectualism in order to gain control of national policy in education. They do not want to be the company of well-informed citizens who can discern the difference between spin and substance.
LikeLike
Thank Goodness. They have tried so hard to conceal that they are in fact Big Brother that they realized this would make it obvious to even the most uninformed public. Tracking is what scientist do to animals.
LikeLike