Musings on the State of Education in the US

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School conditions matter for student achievement, new research confirms

Move over, teacher quality. A new study on New York City schools could make school climate the next frontier in […]

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Low-Income Parents Are Caught Between the Growing Opt-Out Movement and the City’s Attempts to Clamp Down on Dissent

If you needed a sign that the reported détente in the ongoing war over New York's annual public school tests wasn't all it was cracked up to be, it might have come earlier this month. That's when news broke of Southside Williamsburg principal Sereida Rodriguez-Guerra berating a fifth-grader who'd passed...

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A day in the life of a data mined kid

Millions of pieces of data are being collected on students everyday. How safe is it?

Although this article sounds a bit paranoid, its good to know the full scope of data collection in schools. Identity theft and mislabeling children into categories, while rare, does actually happen. Not all data is created equal though, and not everything deserves to get recorded about children. Research groups, however, are able to use a lot of data in areas such as student achievement and propose solutions to reduce the achievement gap.

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Student Data

I just read an interesting article about how Topkea USD 501 tries to incorporate student data into schools. Their solution: create walls that include information such as "gender, race, test scores, special education services, and whether they had transferred schools." Some even included information about whether students are eligible for free or reduced price meals, a measure of family-income levels.

Glossing right past the arguments over whether its ethical, or even legal, to include this level of student information publicly, does it even make sense for teachers to engage with the data in this way? Diane Cox, Executive Director of Student Improvement believes it helps teachers share the burden of responsibility for students in the school. The communal aspect of working together can only make others share in the help. But are teachers uniquely qualified to work with this type of information, analyze, and implement change from it? Probably not. The school district solutions to put teachers in charge of this task seem a lot like putting a band-aid over a wound and hoping that it will just heal itself, but perhaps they should be asking themselves why they have low test scores and graduation rates in the first place. Student data is perfect for finding the root of the underlying problem, but in order to find the answers, you must first ask the right questions. And "can teachers solve this problem for us" is not the right question.