Archives for category: Data
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“The Data Monster Ate My Baby”

By dianeravitch
November 22, 2017 //
12

Blogger Victoria Young warns about the voracious appetite of the Data Monster.

It is coming for your children.

She writes:

“Will we one-day look back and wonder why we let Big Data devour our children’s lives in bits and bytes?
Will we scratch our heads in confusion over why we let data become a major driver in so many aspects of our lives?

“Surely we can see that the tech giants are profiting while the greater society suffers? Maybe not.

“But we do know that Americans care about their own right to privacy.

The issue of who is gathering information and what information is being gathered is considered to be an important dimension of privacy control by nearly all American adults.” Pew Research Center (Views About Data Collection and Security)

“But I wonder, why don’t Americans care about protecting children from the BIG DATA Monster?

“When the biggest concern directing the nation is the workforce/military supply-chain for the global economy, it makes perfect sense to allow the tech industry to have access to all education, health, employment, and income records. And what could go wrong with that?”

Read it all.

“Will we one-day look back and wonder why we let Big Data devour our children’s lives in bits and bytes?
Will we scratch our heads in confusion over why we let data become a major driver in so many aspects of our lives?

Surely we can see that the tech giants are profiting while the greater society suffers? Maybe not.

But we do know that Americans care about their own right to privacy.

“The issue of who is gathering information and what information is being gathered is considered to be an important dimension of privacy control by nearly all American adults.” Pew Research Center (Views About Data Collection and Security)

“But I wonder, why don’t Americans care about protecting children from the BIG DATA Monster?

“When the biggest concern directing the nation is the workforce/military supply-chain for the global economy, it makes perfect sense to allow the tech industry to have access to all education, health, employment, and income records. And what could go wrong with that?”

She says contact your legislator by 11/15, but I didn’t get this in time for that deadline. Contact them now.

Categories Data, Data and Data Mining, Education Reform, Privacy and Privacy Rights

Emily Talmage: Beware The Philanthrocapitalists’ Big New Plan

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2017 //
33

Bill Gates has a big new idea. He has gotten together with a few other big-time philanthropists and created a pool of $500 Million, with which they plan to solve the really big problems in health, education, and economic opportunity. They call their collaboration “Co-Impact.” One of the collaborators is Jeff Skoll, who was one of the producers of the public school-bashing hitjob “Waiting for Superman.”

Emily Talmage is not happy about what’s coming from this group. She sees it as yet another attempt by the super-elites to impose their will on the rest of us, who lack their money and power.

Let us stipulate: no one elected a Bill Gates and his friends to remake social policy. Sure, Trump is busy dismantling and shredding social policy, but who put Bill in charge? One thing we can say about the richest man in America: Every one of his interventions into American education has failed. There is no reason to believe he has learned anything from the slow collapse of VAM and the catastrophe of Common Core. To the contrary, he is still propping CCSS up with new millions, although it’s very name is mud.

Emily writes:

“Gates is one giant, gnarly tree in an dark, overgrown forest of private “givers” who are dead-set on remaking our nation into something reminiscent of a feudalistic society.

“I say it’s time to investigate the whole rotten system that’s allowing this to happen.

“Seriously, folks. This just can’t be okay.”

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Common Core, Data, Education Industry, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

Memphis: Thousands of Parents Opt Out of Sharing Their Names with Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
October 26, 2017 //
8

Most of the charter schools in the failing “Achievement School District” are in Memphis. The bloom is definitely off the rose for charters in Memphis.

The State is compelling districts to turn student data over to charter schools. The Metro Nashville School Board said no. So did the school board in Memphis.

Memphis parents were asked if they would share their data with charters, and thousands of parents said no.

The state is suing the Metro Nashville School Board because it refuses to give its student data to charter recruiters. It will probably sue Memphis too. The state is more concerned about the tiny proportion of students enrolled in charters than about the 90+% enrolled in public schools. This is madness.

The charters say they need the data for their marketing.

What happened to those mythical waiting lists for charters?

If the charters want to compete and take students and resources from the public schools, why should the public schools help them?

PS: Sorry for the typo in the original title; I wrote it on my cell phone last night as I was walking the dog and could not see full title.

Categories Charter Schools, Competition, Corporate Reformers, Data, Education Industry, Memphis, Nashville, Privatization

Bookshelf: Pasi Sahlberg’s “FinnishEd Leadership: Four Big, Inexpensive Ideas to Transform Education”

By dianeravitch
October 3, 2017 //
10

The first thing to say about Pai Sahlberg is that you should read his superb book “Finnish Lessons.” It is the living evidence that we in the U.S. have lost our way. After reading that book, I had the chance to visit Finland for a few days, and the luck to have Pasi as my guide. Imagine a country whose schools have no standardized testing, where teachers are trusted and well prepared, where schools are architecturally impressive, where the emphasis is on the well-bring of children, not test scores; where creativity and the arts are encouraged; where all education, including graduate school, is tuition-free.

I will assume you have read that book. Now you should read Pasi’s short book of advice for education leaders, which elaborates on four ideas. They seem simple, even obvious, but they are not.

Here is Pasi presenting in a small session at Teachers College, Columbia University, just a week or two ago.

The first big idea is that all children should have ample time for unstructured play. In Finland, every hour includes 15 minutes of recess. This not only gives children a break, it gives teachers a break.

The second big idea is that small data, the information gathered by teacher observations, has more value than Big Data, the collection and analysis of large quantities of information that often invades privacy and typically provides correlations, not causation.

The third big idea is the importance of equitable funding, sending money where it is needed most.

The fourth big idea is to beware of urban legends about Finland. Finland, for example, does not recruit the best and the brightest into teaching. It selects those with the strongest commitment to the life of a teacher. There is no Teach for Finland.

It is a short book. Only about 90 pages. It is refreshing. It will remind you about what matters most. Clears away the foggy thinking that is now common among our political leaders.

Categories Creativity, Data, Equity, International, Play

Fred Smith: How De Blasio Juked the Stats to Overstate Test Score Gains

By dianeravitch
August 31, 2017 //
38

Fred Smith is a testing expert who knows how test scores can be manipulated and statistics can be twisted into data pretzels.

In this post, he calls out Mayor de Blasio for hyping the numbers to make the gains far larger than they were. Leave aside for the moment that test scores are a ridiculous way to measure the quality of education. Leave aside the fact that using them as measures of progress feeds into the privatizers’ narrative. Smith caught the Mayor juking the stats for Political gain.

He writes:

Ignore that tall man behind the curtain as he cranks up the volume.

Bearing a strong resemblance to Mayor de Blasio, he is there to proclaim that, “Since 2013, English proficiency has increased by 54 percent and math proficiency has increased by 27 percent.” But the noise machine can’t hide the fact that there is little substance in all the thunder.

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So, the mayor’s Tuesday press release leads with huge gains in reading and math scores—the major, if-you-don’t-remember-anything-else point he wants us to take away as he seeks re-election.

But the percentage gains are statistical smoke that befogs the mayor’s already clouded efforts in education. And, frankly, they raise questions about the incumbent’s honesty.

Three tricks prop up the testing headline:

1. The DOE press release emphasizes percentage gains, which are current results minus previous results divided by previous results. Evidently, the increase in English scores of 14.2 percent (26.4 percent to 40.6 percent) from 2013 to 2017 wasn’t good enough news. Nor was the 8.1 percent gain (29.6 percent to 37.8 percent) in math. So, the press office reaches into its bag of tricks and insists there has been a 54 percent gain in English proficiency under de Blasio—14.2 divided by 26.4 and a 27 percent boost in math—8.1 over 29.6.

Now, can you imagine the mayor doing this if there had been an increase in the murder rate. Let’s say homicides were up from 6 to 7 killings per 100,000 New Yorkers. Would de Blasio say that murders rose by one percent or by 16.7 percent? You know he would minimize the negative outcome.

2. – De Blasio’s spinners also present 2013 as their baseline year. But Mayor Bloomberg owned the 2013 results and most of 2014’s, as well. De Blasio didn’t arrive at City Hall until January 1, 2014. The English test was given on April 1, 2014.

Why would they go back to 2013? It allows de Blasio to start his story the year the ELA and math results tanked–creating a fictional narrative of tremendous achievement. For 2013 was the year the Common Core-aligned tests descended on the schools and rained rigor down on 440,000 New York City students. De Blasio wants to embrace Bloomberg’s bottomed-out, third-term school years as his starting point, because things could only improve after that.

Had the Mayor begun his account with the 2015 results, he would still have a 10.2 percent increase to boast about in English proficiency (from 30.4 percent to 40 percent6 percent), but only a 2.6 percent gain to show in math (35.2 percent to 37.8 percent) under his control of the schools. That would be nothing to brag about.

Ironically, as he notes, Joel Klein too tried to claim credit for test score increases that occurred before he took office.

Sad that test scores are now a political talking point. Just proves how meaningless they are.

Categories Accountability, Bill de Blasio, Data, Klein, Joel, New York City, Testing

Why You Must Not Be “Data Driven”

By dianeravitch
August 28, 2017 //
70

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.”

Categories Accountability, Data

Emily Talmage: How Data is Destroying Our Schools–and Education

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2017 //
61

Emily Talmage teaches in Maine. She recounts in this post her first encounters with data-driven instruction, both in public schools and in a no-excuses charter school. She has come to understand that the data are not meaningful and that they are inherently at odds with the individual nature of the child, who cannot be defined by numbers. She suspects that someone will use whatever data her classes produces to make money. Better to look at the children in front of you, not the data that reduces them to digits on a spreadsheet.

A few weeks into my first year as a teacher, my colleagues and I met for our first “data team” meeting of the year.

Our principal had printed results from the previous year’s standardized tests and given a copy to each of us.

“Take a few minutes to look at the data, and then we’ll decide what inferences we can make from it,” he instructed.

He had a book with him – something with “data coaches” in the title – and was following a protocol laid out within.

I looked at the graphs, then – smiling – at my principal.

Surely he was joking.

At that point in the year, I had only five students – four third graders and one fifth grader – in a self-contained special ed classroom for kids with severe emotional disturbances. They were children who had experienced extreme trauma and abuse, and who struggled to get through a day at school without an attack of panic, rage, or violence.

All five had gotten one’s – the lowest possible score – on the previous year’s math and reading tests.

“Ms. Kennedy,” our principal said flatly, “what inferences can you make from this data? This is how we will be planning our instruction for the year.”

…

It was my first time experiencing the absurdity of data-driven education, but far from my last.

Then she worked at a no-excuses charter school in Brooklyn, and remembering it still gives her nightmares.

Now teaching in Maine, she is swimming–or drowning–in data, and she learns nothing from it that she didn’t know already.

Yet somewhere, she assumes, someone is figuring out how to monetize the data, even though it is utterly meaningless.

Categories Data

Gary Rubinstein: The Alum-Lie Spreads About College Completion Rates for Charter Students

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2017 //
60

Gary Rubinstein has been bothered by the lies spread about the college completion rates of charter students. He has pointed out that it is unfair to say that X% of your students in twelfth grade finished college without admitting that twelfth grade is not the right place to begin, since it excludes the attrition that may have occurred earlier.

Among charters, KIPP has been honest in stating that it counts the students who completed eighth grade and persisted to high school graduation. Others say they just can’t find the data to learn when their senior started in their school. Can you believe that?

Gary posts a twitter exchange he had with Richard Whitmire, who clearly did not want to engage with Gary. Whitmire wrote a fawning bio of Michelle Rhee, then a book praising Rocketship Charters. Not a high success rate.

What Gary is looking for is candor, not boasting.

It seems the public is beginning to understand that charter school boasting is built on cherrypicking students and pushing out the ones that get low scores.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Data, Education Industry, Higher Education, KIPP Charter Schools, Privatization

Peter Greene: What William Sanders Learned About Teachers by Studying Radioactive Cows

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2017 //
31

We now know that William Sanders, the creator of Value-Added Measurement, which measures teacher quality with the methods of an agricultural statistician, is revered in the think tank world of D.C.

But Peter Greene, who teaches in a Pennsylvania high school, doesn’t think much of VAM.

He recounts how Sanders was inspired to think about measuring teachers based on his studies of radioactivity in cows that were downwind from a nuclear explosion (really!).

To which Sanders writes:

Oh, let’s tell the truth. VAM systems have also been limited by the fact that they’re junk, taking bad data from test scores, massaging them through an opaque and improbable mathematical model to arrive at conclusions that are volatile and inconsistent and which a myriad educators have looked at and responded, “Well, this can’t possible be right.”

You’ll never find me arguing against any accountability; taxpayers (and I am one) have the right to know how their money is spent. But Sander’s work ultimately wasted a lot of time and money and produced a system about as effective as checking toad warts under a full moon– worse, because it looked all number and sciencey and so lots of suckers believed in it. Carey can be the apologist crafting it all into a charming and earnest tale, but the bottom line is that VAM has done plenty of damage, and we’d all be better off if Sanders had stuck to his radioactive cows.

Categories Accountability, Data, Hoax, Teacher Evaluations, Testing, VAM

Chicago: Parent Discovers Massive Breach of Privacy of Student Records

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2017 //
10

A parent in Chicago discovered a massive breach of private data about students in private schools receiving special education services. The data was controlled by Chicago Public Schools, but obviously with little regard for privacy. The parent was a student Privacy activist, Cassie Creswell.

The following post is by Cassie Creswell, a Chicago parent activist from Raise Your Hand Illinois and a key member of our Parent Coalition for Student Privacy. In January, Cassie also testified on our behalf at the Chicago hearings of the Commission for Evidence-Based Policy against overturning the ban to enable the federal government to create a comprehensive student database of personally identifiable information.

More recently, upon examining expenditure files on the Chicago Public School website, Cassie discovered the names of hundreds of students along with the disability services they received at numerous private and parochial schools. She immediately contacted several reporters, and though an article in the Sun-Times subsequently briefly reported on this breach, the reporter did not mention that it was primarily private and parochial students whose data was exposed. In addition, legal claims for special education services that CPS had originally rejected were included along with student names. Cassie’s fuller explanation of this troubling violation of student privacy is below — as well as the fact that at least some of these schools and families have still not been alerted to the breach by CPS.

Cassie writes:

Once again, Chicago Public Schools has improperly shared sensitive student data, the Chicago Sun-Times reported on February 25th.

Medical data about students used to administer outsourced nursing services was stored on an unsecured Google doc available to anyone with the link. And personally-identifiable information (PII) about students with Individualized Education Programs (IEPs), including their name, student identification numbers and information about services and diagnoses related to their disabilities, were included in files of detailed vendor payments posted on the district’s public website.

I discovered this latter information in the vendor payment data, while in the course of searching for information about standardized testing expenditures. The files covered seven fiscal years, 2011-2016, but were only posted on the CPS website this past summer. Noticing what appeared to be a student name and ID number listed in the file struck me as surprising and likely a privacy violation. All in all, there were more than 4500 instances in the files where students’ names appeared along with the special education services they received.

Upon closer examination, it was clear to me that there was a great deal of highly sensitive student personal information that had been disclosed, with payments made from CPS to educational service providers assigned to hundreds of students with special needs attending private schools as well as public schools. Included were the name of the students, the schools in which they were enrolled, their ID numbers, the vendors who had been hired and the services they provided according to the students’ diagnoses. The funds for the payments came from public funds routed through the students’ home districts, CPS, to fulfill requirements of the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) for spending on special education students enrolled in private schools.

This breach has since been confirmed as violating federal and state privacy laws — at least in the case of the public school students whose personal information was disclosed and likely the private school students as well.

Categories Data, Privacy, Special Education, Students
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