Reader John Wund left this. Moment about the power of data to mislead those of blind faith:
“Once, after I had an MS in physics, I was hired by a medical school to work on building a ‘physical biochemistry lab’. I also have a degree in Astronomy, so I think I know something (though, perhaps not everything) about statistics.
“Any useful statistic needs to be accompanied by an ‘error estimate’ and needs to be measuring something clearly agreed upon by everyone (brightness, position, etc.). When psychology pretends to measure ‘intelligence’ every rule is broken, and it sends Gauss whirling in his grave.
“These new tests that pretend to measure ‘teaching’ or ‘skill’ or ‘learning’ are simply an extension of the attempt to (or pretense to) measure ‘intelligence’. There is no clear (non-circular) definition of the trait to be measured, or of it’s importance to a larger society. And, no indication of uncertainty (statistical, rather easy to calculate for those who ‘like numbers’) is ever attached.
“It is not statistics, but their bogus use that is the problem. Most people think that numbers and computers are ‘scientific’, and so they must be honored. I have a funny story about that.
“When I went to the Biochemistry Dept., I found that there was only only one other person who had even a passing acquaintance with computers (this was in the late 60’s). Even that person had little understanding of statistical analysis. At first, I took information, analyzed using a calculator it and wrote out the result for the various profs and post-docs. I found they often questioned the result, so I wrote simple programs (Basic or Fortran) and ran them on a computer hooked up to a teletype machine. Suddenly, the questions stopped. After all, if a machine typed it out, it must be factual! Never mind that I was the one programming the machine.
“People are attracted to the certainty that numbers seem to provide. Unfortunately, those numbers can be used to control people, even if they have no value. The ancient Greeks understood that inductive logic always had more value than deductive. We have forgotten that lesson.
“But, it goes even deeper. Because people venerate numbers (and certainty), they are easily manipulated by those who spout them in a blatantly (to me) inaccurate way. Sadly, numbers have become a way to buffalo people. Remember ‘Ivory Soap’, 99 and 44 one hundredths percent pure? Pure what? Pure bullshit.
“Statistics teaches that there is no certainty (well before Heisenberg). There is only a ‘best guess’ at any particular time, subject to change. Statistics revolving around a poorly defined concept are worthless. As a saying in my past explains, GIGO (garbage in, garbage out). Computers and statistics aren’t the problem, our blind belief in the stuff that comes out of machines is.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I am just going to leave this little nugget right here….
https://consortium.uchicago.edu/publications/teacher-evaluation-chicago-differences-observation-and-value-added-scores-teacher
Last comment was just to get myself logged back into wordpress after having run my computer “cleaning” program.
Be that as it may, a little context to this post. John’s post was a response to my post:
“Have been fighting “data driven instructional decision making” since I first heard the term during a being professionally developed day back in 98 or so. The district I was in was trying to “get ahead of the curve” because that data crap was the “wave of the future”. Well here we are in the future and that data is still crap.”
There is a good discussion following John’s post ending with SDP’s usual poetic wittiness:
SomeDAM poet
August 26, 2017 at 7:59 am
“Uncertainty”
Position and momentum
Uncertain it would seem
To measure both in tandem
Is really just a dream
To try to “measure” learning
Is really game of fools
Impossible discerning
If even there are rules
Teachers that lost their careers from VAM should sue to be reinstated. It is hard to find a bigger pile of garbage than the assumption you can evaluate teachers based on student scores on standardized tests. How many lives and careers were destroyed or shattered by the blind trust in an algorithm, which the author points out, is only as good as the person that crunched the numbers? VAM also operates from the false assumption that it is possible to measure the effectiveness based on student scores. This is an absurd assumption.
retired teacher,
You did it again. Your comment is RIGHT ON! All teachers should collectively SUE the DEFORMERS.
I refuse to vote for anyone who does not support Public Education and Public School Teachers. This is the message I keep sending to the DNC and anyone else who will hear my cry.
Here also is a relevant quote regarding scientists’ ignorance and disregard of the interior life of humans and all that flows from it in the lives of human beings, most notably, an ignorance and disregard for some of the bxxxsxxt about numbers that also flows from scientists’ own massive errors in that domain. Add to the list in the beginning: scientific positivism.
“Durkheimian sociology and behaviourist psychology may have excuses for barring the data of consciousness, for there exist notable difficulties in determining such data; but the business of the scientist is not to allege difficulties as excuses but to overcome them, and neither objectivity in the sense of verification nor the principle of empiricism can be advanced as reasons for ignoring the data of consciousness. . . .” Lonergan, Bernard. “Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan: Insight: A Study of Human Understanding.” Ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran. Toronto: University of Toronto Press (2000/260).
“. . . as reasons for ignoring the data of consciousness. . . ”
What are “the data of consciousness” that is being ignored? I don’t understand that concept. Please explain. After that I may have more questions on the those “reasons” for ignoring said data. Gracias.
Duane E Swacker Some data of consciousness: The fact that you/we/all wonder and ask questions of the type: What is it? seeking intelligibility and meaning. For example, your question about the data of consciousness is one example of someone (you) asking a question of the type: “What is it?” seeking intelligibility and meaning about the content of that question.
There are other kinds of questions that everyone asks; the “it” can be anything and so the form of the question is both generalized and concrete, because it always has some sort of content. It’s just a part of cognitional theory, except that this theory requires the scientist to find the evidence within their own cognitional processes, and it’s fully philosophical (not merely psychological).
But my point is that the kind of meta-mega-statistics that others are talking about here, and rightly criticizing, regardless of the authentic contributions of statistics to our fields, are just another overplay of scientists, statisticians, and educational grunts who have no idea what teachers are for, or that wonder in the student, and their raising of questions for themselves, has anything to do with learning. From the point of view that there is no consciousness, or it cannot be understood (positivism), there are only concepts and data. From there, they quite naturally want to control everything from outside the classroom.
Interesting! To deny that “consciousness” is to deny human “being” (not the term human being as a person). To deny that essence of being that so defines our humanness is absurd and certainly cannot qualify as “scientific thought”.
Do you have examples wherein supposed “scientist” have denied that “being within oneself consciousness”?
Duane E Swacker This is not the venue for this topic. I only brought it up to point to the negation of consciousness as specifically human “data” in much of educational research which is commonly and systematically overlooked in statistics. Consider the implications of that oversight on learning theory.
But yes: neuro-scientists commonly use “mind/insight/questioning/judgment” and lots of other “mind terms,” but not in a technical or theoretical sense (from consulting theories of consciousness). Rather, they use of those terms in their commonsense meaning, which is not technical-theoretical and so, yes, uncritical. This means, for instance, that neuro-scientists want to know about the mind (consciousness) and its relationship to the brain (the so-called mind-body theoretical gap). However, they “look” for it in terms of brains or neurons so that, with that limitation, they cannot find the mind, on principle, nor the relationship of the brain to the mind. They are, as a group, also resistant to using their own mindedness as experimental data. But to be completely empirical, when studying consciousness, we should be able to do so–using an adequate theory.
But again, not for here. If you are interested, here is my “take” on the above issue:
https://www.academia.edu/25322125/Disappearing_the_Brain-Mind_Impasse_UPDATED_May_14_2016
I would disagree with you that this is not the forum for this discussion. I find it enlightening and I’m sure others do too. Thanks for explaining further and answering my question.
Duane E Swacker I appreciate your comment. . . . I am reading the article on Freud in The New Yorker and the answer to your question about scientists’ attitudes is all over that article, both in the reporting and in the reporter/writer.
Is there a link to the article you are reading?
Duane E Swacker You might check the New Yorker’s website. But I get the paper version.
Thanks, will see if I can find it.
Is this the article to which you refer? https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/28/why-freud-survives
Duane E Swacker Yes, that’s the one. Also, if you are interested, I did a point-by-point analysis of a neuroscientist’s article that was in “The Conversation”a couple of months back that addresses that same issue, though I didn’t name it positivism–but merely described the view. The closest I came to naming it was to refer to it as “reduced,” as in “reductionism.”
https://www.academia.edu/32366026/LON_JORNTELLs_Irony_Full_Paper_Wbiblio.docx
Never been much of a Freud fan since reading “Civilization and its Discontents” in high school. Thanks for the link!
Duane
Change the word physics to psychology and Freud would have rated very high on John Baez’ crackpot index.
Here’s the link to the crackpot index
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
Freud would have scored points on nearly every item.
And if there were an item for sex with farm animals he prolly would have got points for that too.
SomeDAM poet I don’t know the intention of your note, but the article on Freud in the New Yorker, that I mentioned, was not advocating for Freud’s theory and thought. Rather it gave a brief history of Freud’s ideas from a much later later point of view, and discussed how his work influenced thought from his time of writing until now. Also, I mentioned the article in passing because, in it, there are several references to and expressions of positivism, which was the issue at hand, and was in the context of how those same ideas affected and infected education. And for the record, I happen to endorse the sciences and especially scientific method; but not scientific positivism.
I also think the only thing good about the Baez list is its regard for evidence and, ultimately, for collaboration. If everyone adhered to it, there would be no creative movements at all. The rest of it, strangely, doesn’t allow for the developmental movements that actually do occur when paradigm shifts are on the horizon. Those movements are not my idea or Freud’s or anyone else’s. Rather they are a matter of how history works. My guess is that Baez is one of those scientists who thinks: “Because Science” where scientists remain loathe to consider the negative and/or positive influences of their own presuppositions that, in fact, should concern all scientists who adhere to CRITICAL method.
If you don’t like John’s definition of crackpot, chose another.
Freud was a crackpot by pretty much any standard.
His ideas were not based on evidence but on fantasy.
Scientific creativity has to live within the constraints of reality.
SomeDAM poet I don’t remember anyone here advocating for Freud’s theories. Who are you arguing with? Did I miss something?
Catherine
My crackpot comment was actually a response to Duane.
That’s why I addressed it to him.😂
SomeDAM poet “My crackpot comment was actually a response to Duane. That’s why I addressed it to him.”
I was aware of that–but your comments about Freud were about my conversation with Duane. Unless I missed something, nowhere in that conversation did either of us advocate for Freudian theories; and yet, you made a straw man out of what you apparently didn’t read–and so you assumed the conversation was about Freudian advocacy–and then argued against it.
But if I have misinterpreted something here, please do correct me.
Catherine
A straw man argument is made as a way of avoiding the main issue.
Perhaps I was not clear, but I was essentially agreeing with your comments about consciousness and reductionism.
I’m not sure why you believe that I was arguing with that — or with you.
My comment about Freud was not even directed at you.
It’s not clear why I can’t comment about Freud in response to Duane’s comment, but I can assure you that it had nothing to do with straw men (unless Freud was actually a straw man, that is😉
PS as I said below, I just don’t believe that anyone really understands consciousness. On that point, we will have to agree to disagree.
SomeDAM poet About the Freud thing–whatever.
But about consciousness, as with any scientific project, it’s not about “belief” or agreeing to disagree. It’s about the evidence. I wrote about that in a paper which I posted the link to n an earlier post–but there is a large field of scholarship (and agreement) about this issue. It just hasn’t hit the mainstream yet.
The stuff I have read (eg, by Penrose et Al) about consciousness must be very dated because it seemed to me that it was still very much an open question.
But if there is widespread agreement about consciousness, how specifically does consciousness come about?
What is the physical mechanism?
If people actually understand it, they should be able to explain the basic idea in a few sentences.
The general approach toward consciousness is that it is merely a matter of enough networked neurons firing in a certain mechanistic way.
As a result, the general belief is that computers will eventually become conscious.
But not all scientists take this view.
Roger Penrose is a very prominent naysayer who believes there is something fundamental that we are missing about consciousness, which he equates with “understanding”. As he points out, computers can play chess at the Grand Master level and even beat the best human players but they don’t really understand the game the way humans do. They win largely through brute force “searches” of possible sequences of moves, which is not at all how humans play. Just how humans do it is still largely a mystery.
Of course, understanding is also what learning is all about, so Penrose would undoubtedly say that computers don’t really learn things.
Reductionism has been very successful in science (particularly physics, which scientists in other fields like to emulate) which is why so many scientists subscribe to it, but it can only take one so far.
As Hamlet said There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
SomeDAM poet “Missing,” indeed. But much of what constitutes consciousness is no longer a theoretical OR existential mystery (see my earlier references); but critical exploration and the accumulation of knowledge about it in “the sciences” remain blocked by a major reluctance to even enter the field. They want to know about the mind, but refuse to think that it is really real.
But the relevant point for this site and for education is that the same half-baked thinking and erred (reductionist/positivist) movements of mind that infect the neurosciences have also infected education and the professions that circumscribe it–long-time, baked-in. As you suggest, not for EVERYONE; but enough to make comprehensive and qualified study of consciousness, and its import on education-proper (our formal fields) “marginal” at best, along with the humanities, the arts, history, and even the social sciences, all of which are commonly understood through the reduced prism of the natural-physical sciences’ data-to-results situation. From the contrary less-accepted view, however, your note is dead-on correct and can be shown to be so.
My mystery comment was specifically addressing how humans play chess, which actually is still a big mystery.
A chess grand master can take a single look at the board and tell what his or her next best move should be.
Even the Grand masters can’t explain precisely how they do it.
But one thing is certain. It is not through an exhaustive search possible moves and countermoves, which is how the computer does it.
But on the larger subject of consciousness, I don’t think anyone really understands what it is or where it comes from.
Scientists can’t even agree on what is involved.
Some believe it is just interacting neurons acting in a purely classical manner, while others like Penrose think it is a quantum phenomenon that acts through microtubules.
SomeDAM poet I guess we’re done with that.
My guess/belief is that homo supposedly sapiens, along with their bastard offspring, AI, will never be able to fully understand “consciousness” or what I prefer to call “being” due to the inherent inability to physically delve into the brain of a person. The best we can hope for is some secondary and tertiary glimpses of what that “being” is and how it comes about.
Thinking about it, and not only for homo supposedly sapiens but also for all cognizant beings, however that may be defined and the definitions can be quite varied, I am amazed that out of, in essence nothing more than two cells (for sexual reproduction) joining and consequently dividing and growing, dividing and growing, we end up with a conscious being. Seems fantastical, and it is. I’m not sure that humans will quite ever completely “understand” what happens as the trillions of electro-chemical biological happenings to make this thing we call a living, cognizant being, are perhaps too numerous over time for the human brain to understand-the scale of occurrences too great to understand, ever.
So, we muddle along, as humans always have, trying to understand our environment enough (and there have been many different social schema and beliefs throughout time and place that have worked) so that we can get to the point of reproduction (which for me is the ultimate purpose of all life) and actually reproduce, albeit with only half of our “being” currently believed passed on through genes in the genetic mixing in/of the offspring.
Duane
It would be the ultimate irony if we were eventually able to understand everything about the universe except our own ability to comprehend it.
Roger Penrose believes that consciousness involves a puzzle that has plagued quantum mechanics since it’s inception, what is termed the “measurement problem”.
It is basically what makes a fundamentally probabilistic system that involves multiple simultaneous “superposed” possibilities reduce to a classical system with only one possibility.
Penrose thinks that when humans have an aha moment (ie, when we understand something) it involves a “collapse” of all the possibilities into a single outcome.
Not that i really understand it.
I don’t.
SDP,
I don’t think I can agree with Penrose (granted that I don’t know much about him and his theories). Trying to reduce everything to a single point/moment seems, well, absurd, especially in “collapsing complexities into a singular aha moment. Cannot that aha moment just be a point wherein understanding of some constructs/situations/mental being are nothing more than an acceptance of some of those things while at the same time ignoring or rejecting some? Why not accept that there are complexities that the human mind can think of but cannot ever “solve” or reduce to intelligible and intelligent bits of consciousness?
And do we have a “measurement problem” in attempting to assess the teaching and learning process which is in essence what we are talking about-consciousness and the ever changing states of our being whether mental or physical or emotional or. . . .
Duane
I think you should watch some talks Penrose has given.
When he talks about “collapse” of multiple possibilities into one he is talking about something that actually happens in quantum mechanical systems (eg, atoms) every time a measurement is performed.
Physicists talk about a “collapse of the wavefunction” (which describes all the possibile States of the system)
Penrose believes that consciousness is actually a quantum phenomenon and that human thinking is somehow tied to the wavefunction collapse.
Penrose is no slouch. He did groundbreaking work on general relativity with none other than Stephen Hawking.
A lot of his ideas seem “out there” but he has been right in many cases so is worth taking seriously.
Unlike Freud, he is no crackpot😄
Instruction should not be data driven. However data needs to used. Often students aren’t agressive in answering questions and mistakenly the teacher assumes they don’t understand. One glance at the data, may tell you a whole different story. Data should not be the sole indicator, but needs to be part of the whole.
I am glad that you recofnize that there is more to education than answering questions asked in a form that can be answered and simplified into a display of data.
The algorithms in use and connected to “correct” answers may well be sophisticated, but the whole idea of statistics as “only an estimate” is supressed by the practice of not displaying margins of error and reducing data to color-coded bands–as many data dashboards do–red, yellow, green and the equally pernicious A-F ratings and variations.
Margins of error are often quite purposefully omitted because they expose the lies.
A good example is VAM.
The margin of error associated with an individual teacher’s score in many cases is larger than the difference between what are categorized as good and poor teachers.
So if the error was included, it would become obvious to everyone that the whole thing was a fraud.
The games that these people play with statistics are very dishonest.
Florida is a case in point
http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2014-03-07/story/more-vam-scores-controversy-math-oversight-could-cost-teachers-jobs-pay
Unbelievably, the University of North Florida statistics prof quoted in that article (Donna Moor), while admitting that errors are critical, says that “forgetting” to include the standard error does not invalidate the VAM scores.
Nonsense.
Statistics without error bars are totally meaningless. You might as well say you don’t know anything if you don’t include the estimate of uncertainty because it might be infinite!
And “forgetting” to include the error?
Please.
Deborah Meier says schools should be data-informed, not data driven.
I think it is VERY important than the supporters of public education start using that word “data-informed”.
The ed reformers are trying to paint public schools and their teachers as not caring at all about data. But the best public schools and teachers do care about data. It isn’t the act of taking a standardized exam that is so terrible for a child. It is how those standardized exams are mis-used and politicized.
It’s a one-day (or 3-day) snapshot of a student that provides data. That data does not tell the whole story but it can be useful for teachers and parents along with the rest of the child’s experience and performance in school that year.
If by “data” we mean solely standardized test scores, I beg to differ. BS tests offer nothing useful and much that is destructive. In order to be useful, they’d actually have to contain meaningful content, not just a set of discombobulated, content-free “skills”. The content would also have to be actually related to things that teachers actually teach, not the other way around. The full tests would have to be available so that teachers would know which answers their students missed. The scores would have to be something more informative than a “1” or a “4” or whatever. The results would have to be somehow not stack ranked because it’s not important how Jane did compared to Sally, but rather what are Jane’s individual strengths and weaknesses? The results would have to be available before the end of the school year with enough time to actually do anything about the results.
In other words, they’d have to be teacher-generated because only the teacher knows what s/he taught in a given year, how the students responded to it and what the results mean for his/her individual students. In which case, of course, the test would no longer be standardized. Any test that purports to assess (much less “measure” [sic]) students across different schools, districts and states and which purports to compare students against each other is useless and provides no “data” to be informed by – just the illusion of data.
Thoroughly agree with Dienne!
I agree with Dienne too. Teacher generated assessments are best. Standardized tests do not provide a snapshot of what any student or school is doing. Only the NAEP, with its large sample size, randomized sampling, and double blind format can provide a snapshot of anything, and it’s not of a single student or school. I really have no use for data or analytics based on standardized tests that fail the basic requirements for statistical study. Along those lines, I must say that this post by John Wund is erudite and eloquent. I couldn’t have said it (and didn’t say it) better! Wunderful!
Haven’t cured you yet of the NAEP bug, eh Left Coast Teacher? Remind me the next time your in the office and I’ll try something stronger.
You’re not your, ay ay ay.
dienne77,
I agree with you that data-informed doesn’t mean ONLY standardized test scores. It is one of MANY data points.
But I disagree with everyone claiming that only teachers should make exams for their classrooms. Do any of you teach elementary school? I can tell you what it is like to have a child in a class of 30+ kids where children are rarely “assessed” and the teacher has no idea what a child is capable of doing. I have seen teachers — superb ones in many ways! — who just didn’t have the time to properly assess so many students and missed important things. I would never want a standardized test to be the ONLY data! That would be terrible. But it can be useful as another data point that informs.
We used to say that data can be used to inform instruction, not drive it.
Great post, John! Yes. Yes. Yes.
the US Department of Education continues to almost completely exclude public schools:
https://www2.ed.gov/news/events/calendars/secschedule.html
I think it’s outrageous that DeVos ignores students, parents and teachers in public schools in order to promote the schools she prefers.
Public schools get grim directives on testing while private and charter schools get careful nurturing and publicly-funded promotion. She should try doing her job instead of running a “choice” political campaign with public schools as the collateral damage.
Chiara Yes. It’s all about using the hard-won vestiges of democracy in order to destroy it.
My son took hours of Common Core testing last year. We don’t have his scores.
These tests aren’t about him- they’re not for his benefit. He gets absolutely no value from spending hours and hours taking those tests. They don’t even bother to get the scores to him in any manner he could possibly use.
The 74Verified account @The74 39m39 minutes ago
More
COMING SOON—Reinventing America’s Schools: @OsborneDavid’s new book & interactive site on the future of education.
I hope you guys are ready. They’re gearing up another round of “public schools suck!” propaganda.
They’ll all be fanning out to every media outlet to insist privatization isn’t privatization and pretend hiring contractors is innovative.
Expect the usual round of horror stories about public schools and how schools are responsible for everything from income inequality to racism.
The unwise “data-driven” way of thinking is deductive, top-down. And, of course, those at the “top” in social systems such as schools believe their job is to analyze things so as to figure out who, at the “bottom,” to finger with absolute, algorithmic certainty.
Yea, right.
Little does the unwise data-driven paradigm seem to get that when something is analyzed, the something loses it essential properties, including especially its context.
A wise “data-driven” paradigm is inductive, bottom-up, and rationally informed. It inherently takes account of known, knowable, and unknowable internal and contextual factors affecting the process about which data were generated, so as to characterize the process with some degree of certainty, but not with absolute certainty, as to the process’ capability to behave predictably within limits.
Case in point: Some years ago when I was PTSA president at an Atlanta middle school, buses arriving late for school day end was a top concern. The principal always blamed the school bus drivers, and expected me to do the same. Instead, I had Deming in my head and so lead the PTSA to undertook a study of the school bus arrival “process” and involved several middle schoolers. What findings? The majority of school buses arrive late, and will in the future arrive late, due to common causes affecting the process that the school bus drivers had no control over. One of the middle schoolers presented the findings to the school board and the study then went to the transportation department and only then did arrival times start to improve.
By happen stance I came across the study a few months ago and, in case anyone might be interested to view it, posted it here…
https://files.acrobat.com/a/preview/262198f2-e3d5-4c1b-8624-4818d93402e2
“those at the “top” in social systems such as schools”
You mean the educrats and adminimals, eh!
What you point to, though, in your discussion of late buses is that many times the processes involved in any human activity are hardly ever looked at from the people who are doing the processes perspective. Seen it over and over in the business sector and that lack of lower level input is especially egregious in the public education sector.
But don’t tell the educrats and adminimals that because it might offend their supposedly hard earned “sensibilities”.
After much trying not to, I have come to have a particular word for their “hard earned ‘sensibilities'”… Bollocks (not to be confused with bullocks).
What an awful post.
“These new tests that pretend to measure ‘teaching’ or ‘skill’ or ‘learning’ are simply an extension of the attempt to (or pretense to) measure ‘intelligence’”
Really? You’re quoting an astronomer/biochemist about intelligence testing, who is aying that any attempt to measure a skill or teaching is equivalent to measuring intelligence?
You posted this?
Please, please elevate the conversation and stay out of the gutter. There is so much you’re right about, but your insistence on having no quality filter really drags down the credibility of you and your supporters.
Cathy O’Neil is an author (“Weapons Of Math Destruction”), mathematician and data scientist who is refreshingly skeptical about data science and the uses it’s put to. She recently had a TED talk posted online (“The Era of Blind Faith In Big Data Must End”) in which she convincingly argues that algorithms are fundamentally opinions and/or objectives expressed in computer code. Though distilled to their mathematical essence, they nevertheless contain the same biases and embedded interests as any other opinion or goal.
Yet we are told all the time that they are as immutable as the law of gravity. It’s another way of being told There Is No Alternative, in this case Because Science.
No wonder the so-called reformers, when asked about the algorithms that underpin the VAM schemes they try to shove down our throats, arrogantly say, “It’s math, you wouldn’t understand.” They never, ever want the public to critically inquire into the premises, assumptions and interests that are “driving” them, and built into the data and “science” they choose to employ.
It’s not data. It’s numerology.
Michael Fiorillo writes: “Yet we are told all the time that they are as immutable as the law of gravity. It’s another way of being told There Is No Alternative, in this case Because Science.”
Boooo to that. Not only are the statisticians’ and scientists’ presumptions (psychological, philosophical, moral-political, historical, cultural, spiritual) overlooked, those presumptions are commonly denied as having any import on either the choosing of data or the outcomes they claim. It’s as if scientists live outside of human existence. This has worked well (in many regards) for the natural and physical sciences for centuries and as long as someone along the line has made systematic some ethical standards on the fields.
However, problems come to the fore when we have human beings (who ALL have such presumptions) working with or on other human beings as “data.” Then we come up against a need to know what those presumptions are–and for the scientists to be clear about them for themselves and for those who want to use their research. (Ha! to that.) But in fact, it’s naive, and (as stated earlier on this site) not very scientific, to think otherwise since those presumptions ARE so influential on the data-to-results situation in any research.
Also, it’s not that there is only a “mire” to be had or the complete loss of objectivity. Rather, it’s that SOME presumptions are GOING TO BE AT WORK regardless. Why not know and state them? (Because it’s difficult???? Scientists scoff at difficulty?)
Systematically and formally, the fields need to choose which presumptions they subscribe to, make them into canons, and then teach in their university departments that at the very least, a comprehensive statement should accompany each study. Yes–it’s a paradigm shift in the sciences and fields. Is it needed? Yes, indeed. (The practice of researchers stating their presuppositions and viewpoints is already stumbling around in the social sciences.)
Because Science. LOL.
Phrenology, astrology, numerology, Dianetics, sitting under pyramids or wearing magnetic bracelets to cure cancer, state standardized [sic] testing
Sciences
Magnetic bracelets can cure big data.
Wipe it clean from your hard drive.
lol
And Scientism…
Oh, and let’s not leave out eugenics, the loud echo of which we hear every time an apologist for “no excuses” charter schools tries to justify their authoritarian practices by saying that “those children” (wink,wink) need “order” and “structure.”
All children need order and structure; what they don’t need is soul-killing authoritarianism based on class and racial stereotypes.
So, today I was at the low-incidence Professional Development and the presenter, one of our ” Autism and low-incidence” specialists was stating that we must be data driven. Like data is the most important thing we do with these special kids. Having remembered this article, I refuted that. She looked at me like I was really crazy. But I refuse to believe I should spend most of my time taking data. I like to give these kids the experiences they need to be successful. It can’t always be measured!
Whenever educrats and administrators use the term “data,” someone needs to speak up and say, “It’s not data just because it’s a number. To rise to the level of being ‘data,’ the number has to correspond to something real.”
The number and coordinates of bumps on your head isn’t data about your personality.
That’s pseudoscience.
Just like the purported “data” from these standardized [sic] tests.
It’s time to shut down this pseudoscientific babble from educrats and administrators. It’s time that when people start talking this nonsense, they be laughed off the stage.
There’s a terrible irony in the fact that to the extent, these days, that someone in education uses the term “data,” he or she is a trafficker in quackery and nonsense.