How Scary Can Big Data Get

There are plenty of people talking repeatedly and forcefully about resisting the infection of public education by the many tentacle-like limbs of Big Data. We know that reformsters have been talking for decades about the prospect of a cradle-to-career pipeline in which all manner of data can be collected and crunched and used to determine how best society can use the human beings that the data represents.

But if you want to see a real-world, already-happening demonstration of what this kind of data looks like, check out this article from the Washington Post that ran last month. "The new way police are surveilling you: Calculating your threat score."

Think Minority Report. Except instead of a predictive criminal system based on three psychics floating in a small pool, it's a giant pool of all the data from everywhere.

The article centers on Fresno's Real Time Crime Center, a high tech hub that allows police to access a gazillion data points available on the on-line world-- including feeds from 800 school and traffic cameras. There's also a library of license plate scans. The city is also networked with microphones that can figure out the location of gunshots. And of course there's a program to monitor social media.

But the scariest of all is a program called Beware. By using special proprietary (and therefore secret) algorithms, Beware can create a color-coded threat level for any person and for any address.

It's not like this is a senseless program with no point. Police repeatedly walk into situations without a clue whether they're facing a relatively harmless citizen or a dangerous menace. To be able to access someone's record in real time, knowing what their most likely response will be-- that was the advantage that small town cops had because they already knew everybody. And this is not just an advantage to police-- if police walk into a non-volatile situation with their own tension dialed back, perhaps a few fewer innocent citizens might not get shot.

But at the same time, the level of access is creepy. And when we attach that kind of data access to Everything a Student Ever Did in School, including databases that attempt to assess students social and emotional characteristics-- well, it's not hard to imagine police approaching someone with guns drawn and ready to fire at a danger-tagged suspect because that suspect had some behavior problems in second grade and some computer software thinks his teenage video gaming habits showed violent tendencies.

Pop culture has numbed us to much of this abuse. The noble heroes of shows like NCIS and Bones and the like regularly violate data privacy, but hey-- they're good guys who are just trying to stop bad guys. But what if the data is not being accessed by Jethro Gibbs, but by J. Edgar Hoover.

Big Data would like to get these data collections up and running for every citizen, and they'd like to get started on children, even infants, before anyone has a chance to object. These are complex and difficult issues, and they deserve a long and careful conversation in our country, but the conversation has barely begun to begin, and the construction of the Surveillance State is already well under way.

CBE & The Data Bottleneck

Can you tell I've been doing a lot of reading about Competency Based Education lately?

While some proponents like to point to more human-friendly versions of CBE such as a personalized district in rural Alaska, the more common picture of CBE is of a huge data-mining monstrosity. And while CBE has been rolling steadily at us under various aliases for a few decades now, it is computer technology that has made it look like both achievable and profitable.

In fact, CBE on the ground really does look like one more variation of the old and failed teaching machines, an intent to convert the entire ed system to the failed model of Rocketship Academy or the very failed model of on-line schooling.

You don't have to dig very far for hints about where CBE is headed. One of the flagship groups leading the charge is iNACOL -- which stands for "International Association for K-12 Online Learning." You can find their logo on works like the report presented by CompetencyWorks (what the hell is it with these guys and smooshedtogether group names?) entitled Re-Engineering Information Technology, a report all about how to redesign your IT systems to accommodate CBE.

Like many CBE fans, these guys are wrestling with the challenge of collecting tons of data, crunching it, making it transparent to students and teachers, and using it to make quick decisions about what should happen next in the student's education.

I'm hearing and reading the stories from teachers on the ground, in classrooms that are in part or in full running CBE, and they all seem to be about getting data through the bottleneck. Teachers who spend hours plugging test/quiz/worksheet scores into their platform. Teachers who maintain data walls on steroids so that students can walk into the room and first thing in the morning see where they are on the standards matrix and task completion matrix. Teachers who are directed to keep the students on those iPads for a significant portion of the day.

Computers become attractive in a CBE approach not because they do a better job of teaching (they don't) or because they are more engaging for students (they aren't) but because nothing else can compare for the speed and efficiency of gathering up the data. To wait for a human to process, score, record, and do data entry on class sets of papers-- that's just too long, too inefficient (plus, if those teachers haven't been properly freed from the tyranny of a union, they might balk at being required to put in fourteen hour days just so they can handle their hours of data entry).

So once again, the technology isn't there to serve education or the students, but to serve the people who think their program is magical. Only computers can clear the data bottleneck and get that sweet, sweet data flowing, and if that means we have to design all tests and worksheets and lessons and objectives so that they are the kind of thing that a computer can easily handle as opposed to, say, the kind of things that actually educate students-- well, the needs of the system outweigh the needs of the humans involved in it.

That's why CBE is destined to be nothing but OBE dressed up as the biggest cyber-school ever. It may not be great education, but at least the data trains run on time.

IBM Wants To Be Your Big Brother

IBM has bought themselves some "sponsored content" over at Slate, which means an advertisement all dolled up to look like an actual article. I imagine these are challenging to write-- exactly how to you hit the sweet spot where you are pitching to someone who is not bright enough to notice they've clicked on "sponsored content" but who is smart enough to appreciate your offered wisdom.

At any rate, IBM clearly would like to be a player in the data-chomping personalized-educating making-money-off-of-ed-biz game. So how's their pitch.

Part I: Boogah-boogah!! 

Students are dropping out! There will be a zillion dropouts in a few years, along with an equally intimidating number of jobs that go unfilled because we won't have enough college grads! And you know those numbers are reliable because they come from our friends at McKinsey. 

Businesses are so aware of America’s growing skills gap that they factor in the quality of local schools when deciding where to set up shop.

Sure. Remember that time that all those companies moved their plants to China and India? No? How about that time that Super-Mega-Corps said, "I don't care how big a tax break you offer us, we're going to a different site because we like the local schools better."

Part 2: Traditional Failure

Traditional schools are so one-size-fits-all. Large class sizes get in the way of that, and clearly the solution to that would not be smaller classes-- not when you can just open another school entirely. When I have so many packages in the back seat of my car that a passenger can't fit, I just buy a new car.

I call baloney on the one-size-fits-all thing, too. I teach at a relatively small school in a ruralish area, and we still manage to prepare students for both ivy league colleges and careers in welding.

Part 3: Data!!!!

Schools are swimming in data. IBM would love to help you collect it and crunch it. Really.

Because with all that data, IBM can help you individualize instruction and figure out exactly what each student needs. IBM has already anticipated what you are going to dislike about this idea:

That doesn’t mean that technology will replace teachers or the human insights that are so critical to understanding students’ needs.

And then they turn to an analogy that is exceptionally bold-- if you want to see how data can make the world awesome, just check out healthcare!!

Yes, the industry where your best hope is that you'll find somebody who will set down the policy manual and care for you like a person, the industry where the length of your care is determined by bean counters and non-medical personnel, the industry where the system feels the best way to help you is to reduce you to a number-- that healthcare industry.

Part 4: Our Schools 

IBM would like to tout some of their partnerships, where their all-encompassing data-gathering has allowed teachers to accomplish amazing things, like the ability to "use analytics to enable teachers to identify both at-risk students and high performers." Because teachers haven't any idea about how to do that. Honestly, there are days when it seems as if the worst stereotypes are true-- computer guys have no idea how to interact with other humans, so they just assume that no other humans know, either. Or maybe this is another iteration of the modern management idea-- management by screen, where a manager just sits in his office and makes decisions based on streams of data.

Either way, no. No, IBM, I do not need some data crunching to tell me things about my students that I, as an actual teaching professional, should be able to work out by using my powers of "looking" and "listening." Plus, by using my powers I can also develop a "relationship" with the student that can provide the foundation for helping that student learn and grow as an individual. I could help coach him forward based on "trust me" and "I know you" as opposed to "the data printout says so."     

But IBM and their data-consuming cloud have bigger ideas-- IBM would like to be your buddy on the cradle-to-career assembly line, letting you know what career you should choose and overseeing your course selection.

IBM’s analytics can also help align students with their prospective career pathways. Australia’s Deakin University, for example, is using IBM’s Watson technology to create a Student Advisor application to give students real-time answers to school-related questions.

I guess when you want to talk to your advisor at 3 AM, or without putting on pants, this would be just the thing. Most of IBM's pitch seems to be aimed for a post-human-relationship world. But the humany stuff does not seem to be where their focus primarily rests.

"The data that is available today is an important natural resource for the next century,” he said. “And education systems that leverage that data are going to be more competitive in the global economy.”

I will have to mull over the data-as-a-natural-resource idea for a while. In the meantime, I going to hold off on hopping on the IBM bus.

Jurassic Education World

Like apparently over half the world's population, we saw Jurrasic World last weekend. Fun film, and we always love the Chris Pratt at our house.

But as with last year's Lego Movie, I could not help noticing that the film underlines how much of popular culture is actually NOT aligned with the values and ideals of reformsters.

Data Driven Control

We know that our female lead is in need of rehabilitation because she is devoted to data. She calls the animals "assets" and cannot bring herself to see them as living, breathing beings. When asked by the owner if the park's visitors and the park's animals are happy, she replied with a customer satisfaction index for the visitors and, flustered, notes that they don't have an instrument for measuring the contentedness of the dinosaurs. The owner says one has to look the creatures in the eyes-- she doesn't understand what he's talking about.

Her unfit nature is further underlined by her inability to relate to her nephews. The character's moral journey involves learning to empathize, to relate, to connect to the children and the animals through something other than data and monitors and spreadsheets.

Beyond that character's journey, we have the usual moral of everything ever written by or based on works of Michael Chrichton-- that human beings invariably put way too much faith in their tools and control (seriously-- it's in everything he's ever written). The data control dream is that if we know everything, we can control everything, and if we control everything, we can make everything turn out exactly the way we want to. The film underlines the inherent falsehood in every clause of that sentence: we can't know enough, knowledge does not bring control, and the chaos inherent in any complex system guarantees unexpected and unplanned for outcomes.

Our unfit, morally adrift park manager is just like a data-driven school reformster, certain that spreadsheets and data are sufficient to turn a school into a factory that creates perfect products (aka students). And the pop culture sees that character as one who must be reformed.

Competition

The closest thing to a villain in the piece is Vincent D'Onofrio's military stooge, the guy who wants to use the barely-trained raptors as a military weapon. But the filmmakers don't position him as an actual official soldier. That would be perhaps unclear to the audience, so they leave him in civilian dress, and rather than talking about power, the writers give him a speech about competition.

The speech strikes all the notes we know-- competition will bring excellence, it pushes folks to greatness, it kills off and weeds out the weak and unfit. And the audience knows he is absolutely a bad guy (also, that he will be eaten by a dinosaur before we're done).

The idea that competition is to be worshiped as a means of Making Things Better, even if people must be sacrificed along the way. We understand that this is glorifying a system over individual creatures, and the character's death is not just a sort of narrative revenge on a bad guy, but an earned irony-- the character is so blind to the human cost of such a competitive that it never really occurs to him that he might be part of that cost.

Competition fans always like the view from a thousand feet up. It's when competition gets up close and personal that it becomes ugly.

Pop Culture Love

It's not like this movie is the only one to include these ideas, but it certainly is going to be one of the biggest ones in a while. And there on the billion dollar, the pop culture underscoring accents what everybody already knows-- deifying data and competition over basic humanity is bad. Not just bad, but the mark of a bad person who needs to be either redeemed or eaten.

Many people really are on the side of public education. They're just slow to realize that charter-choice data and competition fans are selling the same baloney that the movies reject.

Charters, the Core, and the Changing Attack on Public Ed

The attack on public ed has come from many directions over the past decade, and not always with the same intensity from all sides.

For instance, remember not so long ago when one of the leading issues was data gathering? Now it's a less visible issue in the ed debate, probably for a combination of two reason-- 1) some notable public defeats (bye-bye, inBloom) and 2) because the Data Overlords have learned to go about their business more quietly (I think it's entirely possible that they did not initially realize that not everyone would share their enthusiasm for data gathering).

Attack of the Common Core

And, of course, Common Core. CCSS was the one-size-fits-all, top-down, imposed, test-driving monstrosity that looked to many folks like one of the greatest threats to public education out there. We wrote, we talked, we complained, we made uncomfortable alliances, we created facebook groups, all to battle the Biggest Edumonster of All.

But now, after a few years, the fearsome Core is starting to look like the Abominable Snow Monster of the North after Hermie the dentist-elf performs an emergency chomperectomy.

Both its defeats and victories have worked against it. The brand name (Common Core) is firmly ensconced in the public consciousness, but the brand itself is hopelessly hollowed out. People know it when they see it, but everybody sees something different. Kind of like pornography.

I've made this point at length elsewhere, but the short form is that between books and programs and local interpretations and tested versions and the general arble garble of its supporters, Common Core as a national set of standards uniting all US schools on the Same Page simply doesn't exist. And the teacher-supporters haven't helped their cause with their ridiculous attributions to the Core of everything form the discovery of critical thinking to fundamental teaching skills. Together with the loons blaming Core for Communist aggression and fluoridated water, they've shown us the way, and I wish I had seen it sooner-- whatever it is you're doing in your classroom, just nod and say, "Yes, this is totally a Common Core thing!" Nobody anywhere is on solid footing to call you a liar.

Common Core is still the one-size-fits-all product of dabbling educational amateurs. but you know what happens to a one-size-fits-all sweater when it gets worn and passed around by hundreds of human beings with hundreds of different builds? It gets all stretched out of shape until you can barely tell it's a sweater.

Common Core is a meaningless hash, and there isn't a soul in a position of real power willing to stand up and defend it at this point. It can still do real damage to the extent that state or local authorities will try to enforce one stupid piece of educational malpractice or another by hoisting it under the name of Common Core. The Core is still lurking around and doing harm, but the Core of New York State is not the Core of Arizona, which is also not the Core of the PARCC nor the Core of your Pearson textbook series. There will still be hundreds or thousands of terrible ideas ramping about the countryside with the name of CCSS, but the Core's days as The Single Most Serious Threat To Public Education are passing. Common Core has gone from being the name of a very specific large threat to being a name like "Kleenex," used generically to describe many different products.


So, Where Did the Spotlight Go?

I first noted the space opening between charter and core folks last November.

Originally, the Core was going to make a great marketing tool. The Core would be the basis for the tests that would provide the proof that public schools are failing, failing FAILING OMGZ!! and that would open the charter school floodgates. But two things happened.

One was that Core-o-philes frantically called for decoupling the Core from the Big Standardized Tests, thinking that reaction against the BS Test would hurt the Core. Turns out that the tests are pretty resilient. The opt out movement is powerful and gaining strength, but lets be honest-- in the majority of the country, it turns out that if you plunk down something and call it a standardized test, most people will roll over and have their kids take it. Only now and only in certain regions is the opt-out movement gathering real steam.

It also turned out that if you bathed the BS Tests in rosy rhetoric about making sure that students are college and career ready, you don't actually need the standards. In fact, you never needed the standards, because the tests drive instruction all by themselves.

Meanwhile, charter operators embraced a simple truth-- the Core is not necessary for creating a narrative about failing public schools. In fact, in some areas, the Core is part of the proof that public schools are failing (Get your kid into a charter and away from evil Obamacore).

The Hammer and the Broom

The national standards fans and the charter choice crowd were never natural allies. But reformsters of many stripes needed the Big Hammer of Common Core Standards to crack the hard rock shell of public education, to open up that institution to private enterprise. But once the Hammer has done its work, it's not really needed any more.

Common Core's stated purpose was to be the cement that bound together fifty-one higgledy-piggledy educational markets into what would function essentially like one national school district. The Data Overlords liked that idea. The Social Engineers liked that idea. The Profiteers used to like that idea, but it doesn't really matter any more. Corporations like Pearson now have the best of both worlds-- anything with "Common Core" on it can be sold anywhere, but what's between the covers can be any old thing and nobody can really tell the difference.

But the Charter & Choice crowd were never going to want a national school district. They just needed "proof" that Noname Local School is failing so they can rush in to save the poor children trapped in the zip code. Once the Standards Hammer had broken up the public school system into crumbly chunks, the Charter Choice Brrom could come in to sweep up the tasty crumbs.

ESEA

You can see the new emphasis reflected in the proposed Senate rewrite of ESEA.

The proposed law does less than nothing to protect the idea of a Common Core Standards-based national curriculum; in fact, it explicitly ties federal hands so that pursuing such a vision becomes nearly impossible. I suppose you could still try to sell the standards to fifty states based on the merits of common core; you could also open a facility for training unicorns.

What the proposal does do is enshrine the other reformsters True Loves-- testing and charters.

It doesn't actually enshrine testing for any real purpose, seeming to settle for the weird construction that states must continue to give the BS Test, but it's up to the states themselves to figure out exactly why they are giving the BS Test. That's okay-- that's all the legislation necessary to keep the steady revenue stream flowing toward the test manufacturing corporations.

But the Senate ESEA absolutely loves it some charter schools. Money, help with financing, federal strong-arming to get more opened-- the Senate bill is ready to make it rain buckets of cash on the charter sector. This is just one more piece of writing on the wall-- charters are coming to eat punlic schools' lunch, and they are coming hard.

How Does This Change the Debate?

First of all, don't underestimate inertia. One of the reasons that no reformsters have to spend too much juice on CCSS or testing is that inertia is now on their side. Test-and-punish accountability, measuring education in test scores, aligning to amateur-hour bad standards, operating systems intended to create public school failure, ongoing crushing of the teaching profession-- these are the status quo. They have been how US schools work for at least a decade. All those high school grads who aren't going into teaching? Their entire school experience has told them that test prep and teacher bashing and mandated malpractice and teacher-as-dontent-delivery-system-- all these things are not some temporary aberration, but the SOP of how schools function.

We have a whole generation of people who do not know how schools could be any other way.

Second, alliances are going to shift. People who fight the Core will also find themselves more and more fighting a local battle against whatever version of the Core has raised its stupid head. There are plenty of people who hate the Common Core, but they kind of hate public schools, too, and they would be perfectly happy to see traditional public ed replaced with charters and homeschools and twelve kinds of choice. There are lots of folks who think a charter choice system is the perfect antidote to federal overreach.

The whole battle for the soul of public education is going to become more diverse. more spread out across many fronts. Lots of people thought that promoting CCSS was the path to riches and power through their favorite reformy idea, but the last few years have shown that many of them can pursue a more direct path. Common Core was the flashlight that could illuminate the path to privatizing education; now lots of folks can see that path clearly without any help.

If you want another analogy, try this. Common Core was like the breach in the fortress wall, but now the wall is breached, the barbarians are inside the barricades, and they are spreading out to loot whatever castle target they'd always had their eyes on.

CCSS is still worthy of mockery, still deserving of resistance, still an impediment to actual education.

But our problems now are more direct:

* the steady financial starving of public schools to bring on failure
* the use of testing to create a narrative of failure and target schools for acquisition
* breaking down the teaching profession to make it cheaper and more compliant
* the redirecting of public tax dollars from public education to private corporations
* the steady drumbeat to redefine the definition and purpose of public education
* the creation of two systems-- one for haves, one for have-nots

 If Common Core evaporated tomorrow, these issues wouldn't flinch an inch. I won't stop taking potshots at the Core, and I support those that wish to do so. But I think the heart of the debate is shifting. When it comes to the assault on public education, we have bigger fish to fry than the CCSS.

Womb to Workplace Pipeline Under Construction

In the education field, we've been talking about the government's interest in a Cradle-to-Career, Womb-to-Workplace, Conception-to-Cadaver pipeline for some time. But if you keep your focus on what the Department of Education is up to, you may have missed the news that the Department of Labor is already well into the construction of the Not Yet Teething to Not Still Breathing database.

It's called the Workforce Data Quality Initiative, and you can read about the basics right here.

This was a series of grants given to various folks as part of a "collaborative partnership" between the Departments of Labor and Education. Here are the main objectives of the WDQI:

1) Use every piece of workforce data imaginable, from Unemployment Insurance wage records to training programs for veterans and those with disabilities to adult literacy programs.

2) Fix it so workforce data can be matched up with education data "to ultimately create longitudinal data systems with individual-level information beginning with pre-kindergarten through post-secondary schooling all the way through entry and sustained participation in the workforce and employment services system."

3) Get more data. more!

4) Analyze the performance education and training programs.

5) Provide easy to understand "information" so that consumers can choose training and education programs.

Oh, and there's one other "output" expected from the Diapers-to-Dust database.

Additionally, WQDI grantees are expected to use this data analysis to create materials on state workforce performance to share with workforce system stakeholders and the public. 

So when a corporation needs some drones to enhance their labor pool, they will be able to just check the Fetus-to-Fertilizer data pool and order up whatever it is they want.

So if you are dealing with people who think all this talk of a Big Brothery Huggies-to-Depends pipeline is crazy talk, just have them take a look at this website. But don't look for aything happening in the news about it. The fourth round of grants was announced last June; this is already well under way. Your seat on the Onesies-to-Donesies railroad is probably already labeled, tagged, and reserved for you.

Cyber-Security and Our Data Overlords

In the wake of the hack of Sony Pictures over a Seth Rogen movie (because that's the world we live in now-- one where a middling stoner comedy prompts international incidents), comes this promo line from CNN:

Sony hack was bad, but worse is coming.

The story quotes the deputy director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Denise Zheng, commenting that cyber-espionage is happening at an unprecedented rate. Tony Cole, vice president of security firm FireEye said, "This is a global problem. We don't have a malware problem. We have an adversary problem."

The government's own report indicates 61,000 cyber attacks and security breaches. The director of information security issues at the Government Accounting Office is quoted as saying that federal tech is "not as secure as it should be. GAO has been identifying this area as high risk since 1997. It's been a longstanding challenge for the federal government to adequately protect its systems."

So the feds can't keep things safe. A multi-national corporation like Sony, with massive resources and a high motivation to keep their bread and butter in airtight lockbox, can't keep things safe.

Let's set this news next to Pearson and the rest of our Data Overlords whose dream is a vast data ocean so filled with information that it will be able to tell you what breakfast you should eat on the day you're taking a math test. The Data Overlord wing of Reformsterism envisions a day when the womb-to-workplace pipeline is so jammed with information-- both about a person's intellectual achievements and character traits-- that a quick look will tell us everything about that person (including what sort of cog-like function he can best fill in the world).

The intentions surrounding this Big Brothery technoventure are scary enough, but if we add the potential for hackage, pillage and general theft of the information, it becomes even more disastrous. Bad enough that the government and corporations want to gather a huge file on you in order to select your destiny for you. What happens when someone decides it might be profitable to steal your life and all that's in it.

The Data Overlords have periodically reminded us that they'll absolutely keep all that data secure. The news from Sony and the reactions to it remind us that there isn't a government or a corporation on the planet that is actually capable of keeping that promise. It's as if the Data Overlords are saying, "Look, just give us every valuable thing you own, your money, your jewelry, your ATM cards and the pin numbers with them, and we will put them all in a bucket, which we will sit out on our front porch. It will be totally safe. We promise."

6 Lessons from Pearson's Assessment Renaissance

I have plowed through Pearson's massive "Preparing for a Renaissance in Assessment" because these are the people that the reformsters listen to. The paper itself is an 88-page monster; if you would like me to walk you through it, you can start with this post.

But for this post, let me just try to distill some of the big takeaways from Peter Hill and Michael Barber's essay. Here are some important things to know about what Pearson's brave new future education world would look like.

Welcome to the matrix: students will be plugged in

Pearson does not aspire to simply administer a high stakes test or two a couple of times a year. Think of every sort of assessment you do, from unit tests to small check quizzes to daily exercises for understanding. Pearson wants all of that. All. Of. That. Every single bit of assessment will generate data which will go straight into the Big Data Bank so that a complete picture of the individual student can be created and stored. I once noted that the Common Core standards make more sense if viewed as data tags. I wrote that last March, but it still looks correct to me.

The point of having everything done via internet-linked device is not just to deliver instruction and assessment to the student-- it's to be able to collect every bit of data that the student generates.

Through the use of rubrics, which will define performance in terms of a hierarchically ordered set of levels representing increasing quality of responses to specific tasks, and a common set of curriculum identifiers, it will be possible to not only provide immediate feedback to guide learning and teaching but also to build a digital record of achievement that can be interrogated for patterns and used to  generate individualised and pictorial achievement maps or profiles

And Pearson is completely comfortable with assessment and instruction centered on character traits, developing grit and tenacity and prudence and the ability to work well with others. So their system will hoover all that info up as well. By the time your child is eighteen, there will be a complete profile, covering every aspect of her intellectual and personal development. I wonder if Pearson would be able to make any money selling that database to potential employers or to government agencies. Hmmm...

Teachers will not be teachers

Pearson doesn't much like the teaching profession as it currently stands. They believe that teaching must be transformed from a "largely under-qualified and trained, heavily unionized, bureaucratically controlled semi-profession into a true profession with a distinctive knowledge base, framework for teaching, well-defined common terms for describing and analyzing teaching at a level of specificity and strict control."

"Learning systems of the future will free up teacher time currently spent on preparation, marking and record-keeping and allow a greater focus on the professional roles of diagnosis, personalized instruction, scaffolding deep learning, motivation, guidance and care." The system will do all the planning and implementing, and the system will put all the necessary technology at hand. "But without such a systematic, data-driven approach to instruction, teaching remains an imprecise and somewhat idiosyncratic process that is too dependent on the personal intuition and competence of individual teachers."

All educational decisions will be made by the software and the system. Teachers will just be needed as a sort of stewardess. We will teacher-proof the classroom, so that any nasty individuality cannot mess up the system.

Personalized learning won't be

Pearson's concept of personalized learning is really about personalized pacing. The framework for learning starts with "validated maps of the sequence in which students typically learn a given curriculum outcome." So-- like railroad tracks. Personalized does not mean wandering all over a variety of possible learning paths. It means adjusting to move slower or faster while pausing for review when there's a need to fill in holes.

Pearson does not offer an answer to the age-old question, "How do all students move at their own paces but still cross the finish line in time?"  They do suggest that we give up the old age-grade progression, and they believe that high expectations fix everything, but they do not directly explain if that's enough to keep some students from being stuck in school until they're twenty-nine years old.

Character may be important, but humanity, not so much

One of the odd disconnects in Pearson's vision is that they value (enough to plan measuring) social skills and character, but they do not pause to consider how their system might affect or be affected by the development of these qualities.

What does it do to the development of a child to be in groups that change regularly because of differing educational pace. What will happen when an eight year old must leave her best friend behind because she is being moved up? What will happen to the very bright twelve-year-old grouped with a bunch of fairly slow seventeen-year-olds?

Pearson lists a wide variety of possible obstacles to this system's emergence, but they assume that students will simply fall in line and take the system seriously, feeling some sort of accountability to the device screen that delivers their instruction and assessment. Teachers no longer automatically receive the trust and respect of our students--we have to earn it. Pearson assumes that because they think they're important, students will, too. That's a bad assumption.

Software will be magical

Pearson knows that trying to test any higher levels of cognition with bubble test questions is doomed to failure. Their solution is magical software. Software can ask questions that will delve deep, and software can read and assess the answers to open-ended essay questions. Software can suss out a student's intelligence so well that it can then create more test items that will be perfect for that student. Software can unerringly crunch all the data to create a perfect profile of the student. Software can do all of these things better than live human beings (even though software is written by live human beings).

And if you believe all that, I would like to sell you some software that controls the Brooklyn Bridge.


Important people are listening to these guys

You cannot read a page of this essay without encountering familiar references. New tests that move beyond the old bubble tests. High expectations can bring all students up to excellence. Enhanced data collection will lead to better learning. The job of teaching needs to be changed. We've heard it all from various bureaucrats, reformster leaders, and US Secretaries of Education.

Important people pay attention to Pearson, even though most of their ideas are rather dumb and self-serving. We all need to be paying attention to Pearson as well, because back behind the Gatesian money and the policies of Arne Duncan we find these guys, generating and articulating the ideas that become foundational to the reformsters.

It would be easy to dismiss Pearson as simple money-grubbing corporatists, to lump them together with the goofy amateurism of a Duncan or a Coleman. But they are rich, they are polished, they are powerful, and they are, I believe, driven. I have never read work by Michael Barber in which he does not note that changing the global face of education is a moral imperative, a job that he must do because he knows what must be done to improve mankind. For me, that takes this all to a new level of scary.

Report Shows Huge $$ In Ed Testing

I know, I know. Later I'll do a post in which we learn that water is wet.

This report comes from the education division of the Software and Information Industry Association, "the principal trade association for the software and digital content industries." (h/t to Jim Horn at Schools Matter) It's an extension of their annual survey of their members, so this is how the education market looks to the people who hope to make money from it. This is not the hypothetical fretting of those of us in the education biz.

The survey covers a three-year span, and the findings are simple and stark. During a period marked by "difficult economic times during an overall PreK-12 budget and spending decline," the industry saw an increase in testing and assessment sales of 57%. And the three years in the survey are 2010-2011 through 2012-2013. Anybody want to place bets on how the trend continued in 2013-2014?

In dollar amounts, the 2012-2013 dollar figures is around $2,500,000,000. Two and a half billion. With a "b."

The executive summary is available on line (the full report seems to have been released only to member companies), and there's not a great deal to see there. It's not even very slick and pretty, kind of like it was an actual industry group report and not some sort of thinky tank advertising brochure masquerading as a report. At any rate, that means we can only see the broad outlines, and those simply confirm what common sense already told us.

Participants in the survey identified four factors contributing to the huge mountain of money they now find themselves perched atop.

1. The Common Core Standards are changing curricula
2. The rollout of Common Core Assessments are [sic] galvanizing activity
3. There is widespread demand for more and better formative assessment
4. Testing and assessment is [sic] leading the transition from print to digital

I'll subtract points for the subject-verb agreement problems, but they get some back for using "galvanizing." Nice word. In other words, Common Core has cracked open the market so that money can pour out. Note also that as far as these guys are concerned, Common Core Assessments are a thing, so those who insist that the standards and the tests are two discrete and unconnected issues are contradicted for the sixty gazzilionth time. The mandate that testing be done on line is having the expected effect of making huge money for the digital stuff industry. The widespread demand for more formative assessment? I'm not sure who out here is hollering for more tests, but these four factors were noted "almost universally" by respondents. Four less commonly noted factors were

1. School districts are requiring interoperability
2. Big Data and Analytics are driving infrastructure
3. Real-time digital assessments are actionable
4. Linking assessments to content holds the promise of personalization

The first two reinforce the idea that our Data Overlords and their government minions continue to holler "Feed me!" The third item reinforces that English is a second language to these guys; it means, I believe, that getting instant test results is a thing that could be done. Four is the unicorn hunt of personalization; the idea that a program can look at all of a student's answers on the computer-based assessment and then spit out just the right instructional plan for that student is exactly the sort of thing that people who don't have any real knowledge of teaching and education think would be really cool and actionable.

The report ranks various product lines in terms of revenue generation. Summative testing is most of the mountain, which serves as one more sign that the reformster baloney about how one purpose of the High Stakes Testing is to guide and tweak instruction is Just Not So. That would be formative testing, which is runner up in the Making Us Money contest, followed distantly by psychological testing and test prep products.

They also offer two cautions against irrational exuberance. First, people are starting to get seriously antsy about the massive threats to and violations of student privacy. Second, the market for summative testing seems to be slowing and perhaps close to filled.

The full report appears to address all ten of these points in greater detail. If anybody's got a copy lying around, I'd be glad to have a look. But it appears that this report offers less Shocking Surprise Revelation and more Confirmation of What You Already Were Pretty Sure Was True.

Core Ready Schools, Aspen and Achieve

So you want to know how your district is doing on the implementation of the Common Core? Well, the folks at Achieve and the Aspen Institute have a tool for you. It's Core Ready Schools, 
a handy tool for evaluating your school's progress in implementation that only misses one huge, gigantic, Uranus-sized indicator. But let me work up to it.

There is a whole 90-minute rollout presentation on video right here and I know I usually watch these things for you, but I couldn't quite get through all of it. But let me tell you about what I did get through, and if you actually want to watch the whole thing, drop me a note in the comments and let me know how it was. Because who knows-- it might not have been quite as mind-numbing as I began to fear it was.

The video opens with a nice lady from Aspen who covers a bunch of specs and screenshots about the-- well, she keeps calling it an app, but it appears to be a website. Also big thanks to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, and their Program Officier, which I infer is a person from the foundation who comes and works with you on your program so that you don't have to do that nasty application process, and for some reason I'm thinking of the Roman system of local governors, but maybe we should leave this for another day. What's this thing actually for? Well, it's not an accountability tool (I know because she said so). Let's bring up Mike Cohen from Achieve to talk.

Mike from Achieve talks about Achieve's Core cred and says "I feel like the Home Depot of the Common Core" Nobody laughed and he took that to mean that nobody got that joke at all."It's a tough crowd this morning"

Anyway, Achieve was concerned about a lack of data and tools to monitor implementation. They needed a way to get data on how implementation was going on state level. First tries they gave up as too hard. But then somehow we all realized that Aspen had already kind of done the work, with their handy transition guide for school leaders and so the Core Ready Schools app-site-tool covers similar ground.

Core Ready Schools ia aimed at things you would want to monitor, and that chiefs at CCSSO would commit to using. Something lightweight, but with depth. Balance of common across states but flexible enough for individual states. Here are the seven factors Mike says (the site calls them "levers") the tool is designed to consider.

1) Is leadership focusing on CCSS as part of school improvement
2) Is instruction being aligned with it
3) Is ongoing professional development supporting CCSS
4) Do you have an aligned assessment system?
5) Do you have aligned instruction resources and curriculum in school
6) Do you have mechanisms for engaging families and communities (because you're going to have to get them to buy into this, so by "engage" we seem to mean "talk to" and not "listen to.")
7) And are there sufficient resources and staffing (technology)

The tool is supposed to allow for different states' emphasis and ways to collect data. Mike tells a story about how one school chief was just going to ask superintendents how things were going and not dig any deeper. "Don't you think there will be inflation" "Yes, but then they'll have a harder time explaining results on assessments." So, give a principal enough rope? With this not-an-accountability tool?

Mike also says, "They desperately need it to know what's going on-- there's no debate about that." I would be happy to debate him. Also, though this started as Common Core thing, but they've been flexing it to handle states other CACR standards. Because we'd hate to get left behind when the Core is dumped.

Do you know what we haven't talked about?

I said there was a glaring omission. So far it appears that when we're assessing the success of our Common Core implication, we are not going to ask if the students in the schools seem to be getting a better education. That seems to be primarily because we assume that if Common Core is well-implemented, it will automatically lead to better test scores (what? is there some other way to measure how well children are being educated?) But no-- at no point in this entire process do we actually look at the affect of Core implementation on student learning.

Who is this for again?

This tool fits the whole reformster style because it assumes that superintendents simply can't know what is going on in their own districts, presumably because of some combination of stupidity and lying subordinates. Also, of course, information is far more informationny when it's in number form.

The big selling point here is that this tool will be useful inside of districts, helping leaders tell how well the implementation is going on inside the district. This skips over the question of whether we should implement CCSS in the first place, plus it skips over another question-- when school leaders are implementing a program because it has been mandated and they had no say in it, how much time to they spend worrying about implementing it well? Or, on the deeper philosophical level, how much commitment to doing a bad thing well is a good amount of commitment to doing a bad thing well. Or, if you prefer classic filmic references, exactly whom should we be rooting for in Bridge on the River Kwai?

Never mind that for a moment, because I'd like to offer for your consideration the user agreement from the Core Ready Schools website:

By clicking the button below, you agree to have your anonymized survey results recorded by Anabliss Design + Brand Strategy and shared with the Aspen Institute. The Aspen Institute reserves the right to utilize the data in research, analysis, and reporting on the implementation of the CCSS and other education-related trends; however, the Aspen Institute agrees that any data disclosed will be anonymized data that is not tied to specific users and is not released in any manner that could identify an individual, school, or school district.

So, NOT just collecting data for your district. You're also collecting data for Aspen and their friends. You are volunteering for a walk-on roll for the next production of "How the Implementation of Common Core Is Going in Our Schools." Yes, it's one more great chance to do free grunt work for our Data Overlords.

More fun with websites

One cool things about Core Ready Schools? Anybody can log in and create an account. You could, for instance, sign in and start the account for your school or district; I did that, and I'm sure my superintendent will be calling to thank me if she ever hears about it. I suppose you could log in and start an account for any school-- even fake ones-- although if a lot of people did that, it might make Aspen's aggregated numbers less accurate, and that would be a shame, I imagine.

You're allowed to take the survey ten times over five years. I found the questions simple and the interface easy to navigate. There are just a handful of self-assessment questions for each "lever," and most of them are unexceptional. The program occasionally reveals its blind spots. One of the questions about instruction asks about how well teachers understand and use the Core, and it does not allow for the possibility that teachers are familiar with the Core but don't use it because they don't want to. Everything in the survey assumes that we all want to welcome the Core into our home and make it happy here and that its success will naturally flow into educational awesomeness and joy for all. There is no "You're not my real mom" option.

The whole effect is very Borgian, and it reveals an extremely specific view of exactly how a school should be assimilated into the Core universe. This is no surprise. Since the Core is a one-size-fits-all prescription for students, why would it not come with a one-size-fits-all school districts to implement it? Yes, Aspen is promising customizable versions of this tool (for a price), but this is customizable in the same manner as a fast food burger-- you can change the balance of the elements a bit, but you'll be choosing how to tweak the ingredients that the restaurant has chosen for you. So, not very customizable at all (kind of like that "personalized" education we keep hearing about).

So if your school district decides to sign on to this handy tool, God bless you and have fun. Thank you for making a contribution to the giant holding cells of our Data Overlords.And remember-- student learning is irrelevant to the process.

The Limits of Data

There was a moment during a presentation at last weeks' Professional Learning Communities training (institute? gathering? big thingy?) that really illustrated, I think a bit unintentionally, the nuts-and-bolts problems with using data to "analyze" teacher effectiveness.

A chart of data from three classes broken down by three skills was on the screen, presented in student by student format. First, we looked at properly parsing the scores-- count the number of students who don't make the cut score rather than looking at averages for the class. Looked at that was, it was clear that one class had excellent results, one class had middlin' results, and one had lousy results.

And then  Dick DuFour started anticipating the explanations.

The classes might have different compositions of students. The classes might include students with learning disabilities. The classes might be at different times of day. Every possible reason you or I might give. And each one, for our example, was explained away. I honestly don't remember whether this was a real case study or a hypothetical example, but the classes were, for all intents and purposes, identical in composition.

The progression of his example was clear. After you have eliminated all other factors as an explanation, only one factor remains. The teacher.

After you have eliminated all other factors.

To make his point, he had to explain away all other variables. And this remains one of the huge limitations of student data. It's basic experimental design-- you have to control for all variables. Otherwise your data tells you nothing. If we design an experiment where plants growing in every different climate of the globe with every possible variation in light exposure, soil types, and types of plants, and then we treat each plant with a different fertilizer, the data we develop will tell us virtually nothing useful about the efficacy of the various fertilizers.

Reformsters have tried to manage the variables in several ways. They insist, for instance, that poverty, language barriers, and learning disabilities are not meaningful variables, that they make no more difference than the color of the wrapper on the fertilizer. They have tried to insist that what we think of as differences between students are not significant differences at all.

The various versions of VAM claim to be able to correct mathematically for the variables. We supposedly know that Level 3.2 squared of poverty affects student achievement by a degree of X sigma over the sine of Y and a half. My question has always been, if we know that precisely what the effects of poverty (or other factors) on student achievement, why can't we design instructional techniques to compensate for that factor. But it doesn't matter-- after we run all students through the VAMinator, they will come out the other side equalized, exactly the same.

PLCs can deal with the data gap simply, because given a good administration, the only people who have to sort out the data are the teachers in the PLC. First, they get to design the data instruments themselves, so they know what the data is supposed to mean-- its not badly written Mystery Crap in a Box. They they get to be the people who crunch the data. They have the power, authority and responsibility to say, "What we have here are apples and oranges, but we know these kids, and we can factor in their differences using our best professional judgment. We know there is more going on here than just pedagogical differences between the four of us."

But on the state and national scale, this insistence that we can explain away all differences between students becomes a large-scale farce handled by people far removed from the actual teachers and the actual students. Under the PLC model, the teachers are the data gatherers, and they are accountable to each other. You don't look your co-worker in the eye and try to sell her some made-up baloney to her face. Under the reformster model, teachers are removed from every single part of the process except the Getting Blamed For Everything part. They get to force-feed their baloney without looking anybody, anywhere in the eye.

Serious People

Why is it that I'm so hard on some people I disagree with here and so gentle with others? Because I have a hard time taking people seriously when they aren't serious people.

Certain positions in the current debates indicate clearly how serious a person is. I don't support the idea of national education standards; I think it's a bad idea, doomed to failure, that will not yield any of the benefits its supporters believe in. But I recognize that serious, well-intentioned, intelligent people can support the idea. Pitch national standards to me and I will disagree with you, but I won't automatically think less of you.

On the other hand, no serious person could ever say, "Only Common Core has made it possible for me to teach critical thinking in my classroom." Say that, and you have announced that you are a silly person, and I will treat you like a silly person who insists on saying silly things.

Serious people are not necessarily serious (I think of myself as a serious person), but you can usually spot them by their language:

1) Serious people recognize that words have both meaning and consequences. They don't just say whatever bullshit they feel like making up just because. They do not view communication as a game to win. They consider how words and actions really affect the things they claim to be serious about.

2) Serious people seek congruity between reality, their values, and their goals. Serious people don't focus on one at the cost of the other two. They do not ignore reality and sacrifice their values in order to achieve goals. They do not allow their values to blind them to reality. They do not look at reality and give up everything else. They don't ignore reality because it might be inconvenient.

3) Serious people do not lie. Most particularly, they do not lie about their goals and objectives. They are not bullshit artists. It's the silly people who will pee on your leg, tell you it's raining, and expect you to believe them because they used words and a faux serious expression.

One of the most striking things about the battle for public education is what a large percentage of the people fighting in the resistance are serious people, and what a large percentage of the people battling for the CCSS-anchored, high stakes test-driven, corporate backed status quo are NOT serious people.

Arne Duncan is not a serious person. Earlier in his career he made noises that sounded good, but which were unrelated to the actual policies he pursued. More often lately he sounds like that kid who hasn't done the homework but is hoping he can bullshit his way past you. There are no signs that he has ever made a serious attempt to see what is happening on the ground when it comes to the current test-driven status quo.

She Who Must Not Be Named is not a serious person. She does not appear to grasp the connection between rhetoric and reality, that somehow if you declare, "I must take action to show my deep and abiding love for you," and then punch your partner is the face, that's perfectly okay. Especially if you then announce, "He was totally pulling a gun on me." Even if there's no gun to be found.

David Coleman and his ilk are not serious people. Coleman has no more interest in what actually happens in classrooms than he has in the traffic patterns in ant colonies. When you are so deeply wise, you don't need to understand lesser realities-- you just make them bend to your will.

The Hedgemasters backing the charter movement are not serious people. Charters are investment opportunities and educational rhetoric is just ad copy. They are no more serious about finding real educational solutions than General Mills is serious about researching what the most healthy breakfast would really include.

The Data Overlords are not serious people. Or rather, they're not serious about education. They are serious about data collection, but it really makes no difference to them whether the education delivered is good or not, just as long as it's all tagged and bagged.

The Systems and Government pushers are not serious people. They are sure that if they can get total control of the whole system, it will work the way they imagine it will, and they do not want to be distracted by any evidence to the contrary. The pursuit of excellence should never be derailed by facts, or by the puny lesser humans who get in the way.

The corporate profiteers are not serious people. When Pearson believes their main problem is bad PR, they show such a disconnect from life on this planet that they cannot be taken as serious people.

People who are serious about education recognize that education is hard, teaching is hard, learning is hard, and that it takes a lifetime of looking and listening and paying attention to get a handle on how all the moving pieces of a public education are working. They seek to live out their respect and devotion to education, and they seek to live out their respect for the students that we serve. They align their words and actions and values. They are not worried about making education a lesser priority than profits and power.

If you are serious about education, your focus is on education. Not on finding facts to match your pre-conceived notions. Not on figuring out ways to "message" people so that they will believe you (and not, say, their eyes). Not on how you can use education to further your own ends (and it's someone else's problem if education gets busted up while being used as a tool). And certainly not on arranging for the biggest payout.

I have not yet mentioned the biggest tell of all-- serious people are still, always looking for answers. Do serious people sometimes fall for the reformy rubbish? Yes, they do. But I can tell they're serious because they are still trying to figure out how all this can fit together (and ultimately, like the entirely-serious Diane Ravitch, figuring out that it doesn't). Beware people who believe they have all the answers (personally, I have about 2% of the answers).

The supporters of the high-stakes test-driven corporate-backed status quo are, for the most part, silly people. Dangerous, powerful silly people, but still, while I have to take the danger they pose to public education seriously, I find it impossible to take them seriously at all.

Cloudy with a Chance of Data

There are so many reasons to be opposed to the business of mining and crunching data. We like to rail about how the data miners are oppressive and Big Brothery and overreaching. But there's another point worth making about our Data Overlords:

Data miners are not very good at their job.

My first wife and I divorced about twenty years ago. We have both since remarried and moved multiple times. And yet, I still get occasional pieces of mail for her here at my current home. The last time I looked at my credit report, it included me living at an address that she used after we split. I could try to get it changed but A) she is a responsible woman who I'm sure has excellent credit and B) have you ever tried to get info on your credit report changed?

As I work on this, several other browser windows are showing ads for K12. I cruised to some sites maybe two weeks ago doing research for some pieces about cyber charters, but now my browser and adsense are sure I'm in the market for cyberschool. It is tempting to click the ads repeatedly in order to drain k12's ad budget of another wasted 25 cents, but I would have to live with the consequences.

My brother and I have an old game we sometimes play. When pollsters call us, we answer opposite of our actual beliefs in order to feed the pollster false info. Because who says we can't or shouldn't?

Before anything of use can happen in the data cloud, two things must be true:

1) The data must be good.

The tools for collection must be accurate. Designing good data collection tools is hard. The Data Overlords are trying to convert all the tools of instruction and assessment into tools for data gathering, but that's not what they're generally designed to do. Most fundamentally, I collect data about a student to create a picture of that student, not to turn that student into one data point among millions.

But beyond the accuracy of the tool, there is the willingness of the data generators. I suspect this is a blind spot for Data Overlords-- they are so convinced of the importance of data collection that they don't necessarily understand that most of us feel no compelling reason to cooperate.

There is no moral imperative to help the Data Overlords gather accurate data.

2) The program for crunching it must be good.

In the late seventies I was studying BASIC programming language and our professor was reminding us repeatedly that computers are stupid machines that happen to possess speed and long attention spans. If we tell them to do stupid things, they will-- but really, really fast! A computer is not one whit "smarter" than the person who programmed it.

If the person writing the software believes that knowing "2 + 2 = 5" means you're ready for calculus, the program will find many six-year-olds are prepared for math courses.

Put another way, a computer doesn't know how to predict anything that no human being knows how to predict, and it particularly doesn't know how to predict anything involving a series of complicated data points that the software writer failed to anticipate. So a human being could easily figure out that my ex-wife doesn't live here, but the software lacks the complexity to pull together the right data. And a human being could figure out that I used some of my brother's airline points to get a magazine subscription, but the software thinks he might live here, too.

The software can't figure out how to put every single person together with his/her perfect romantic match. It can't figure out exactly what movie you want to watch right this minute. And it doesn't know that I hope K12 dies a permanent death.

It's as simple as GIGO-- bad data processed poorly yields no useful results. Waving your laser pointer and intoning, "Look! Compuuuuters! Data! Data made out of numbers!! It's magical!!" will not convince me to cheerfully welcome my New Data Overlords.

Who Puts the Scary in Pearson? Meet Knewton.

Behind the data generating-and-collecting behemoth that is Pearson is a company called Knewton. And here's a video from the November 2012 Education Datapallooza (a name that I did NOT make up, but was officially given the event by the Dept of Education, because they are so hip. I believe they also listen to the rap music).  In just under ten minutes, Jose Ferreira, Knewton CEO, delivers the clearest picture I've ever seen of the intentions of the Acolytes of Data. (H/T to Anne Patrick.)

He opens with the notion that in the next few decades, we will become a totally data mined world. There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about that, but that's another post. He may well be right. He believes that has big implications for education, because while everybody is just collecting data in dribs and drabs, education is the Great River O'Data.

Knewton is now (and remember-- "now" is 2012) collecting millions of data points per day per student. And they can do that because these are students who are plugged into Pearson, and Pearson has tagged every damn thing. And it was this point at which I had my first light bulb moment.

All that aligning we've been doing, all that work to mark our units and assignments and, in some places, every single work sheet and assignment so that we can show at a glance that these five sentences are tied to specific standards-- all those PD afternoons we spent marking Worksheet #3 as Standard LA.12.B.3.17-- that's not, as some of us have assumed, just the government's hamfisted way of making sure we've toed the line.

It's to generate data.

Worksheet #3 is tagged LA.12.B.3.17, so that when Pat does the sheet his score goes into the Big Data Cloud as part of the data picture of Pat's work. (If you'd already figured this out, forgive me-- I was never the fastest kid in class).

Knewton will generate this giant data picture. Ferreira presents this the same way you'd say, "Once we get milk and bread at the store," when I suspect it's really more on the order of "Once we cure cancer by using our anti-gravity skateboards," but never mind. Once the data maps are up and running, Knewton will start operating like a giant educational match.com, connecting Pat with a perfect educational match so that Pat's teacher in Iowa can use the technique that some other teacher used with some other kid in Minnesota. Because students are just data-generating widgets.

Ferreira is also impressed that the data was able to tell him that some students in a class are slow and struggling, while another student could take the final on Day 14 and get an A, and for the five billionth time I want to ask this Purveyor of Educational Revolution, "Just how stupid do you think teachers are?? Do you think we are actually incapable of figuring those sorts of things out on our own?"

But don't be insulted-- it's not just teachers who are stupid, but the students themselves. Knewton imagines a day when they can tell students how they best learn and under what conditions. Will you do best watching videos or reading? "We should be able to tell you what you should have for breakfast [to do well on a test]"

Because human beings are simple linear systems and if you measure all the inputs, you can predict all the outputs? That seems to be our assumption, and even I, a high school English teacher for crying out loud, know enough about chaos theory and the systems of complex systems to know that that is a fool's game. (If you want to read more about it, and you should, I highly recommend Chaos by James Gleick)

Beyond the privacy implications and the human-beings-as-widgets implications and the necessity to tag every damn sentence of every damn assignment so our data overlords may drink their fill-- beyond all that, there are implications for what an education means.

One aspect of becoming an educated person is getting to know yourself, to understand your strengths and weaknesses, your abilities and deficits, defining your own character, and making choices about how to be in the world as a your particular version of a human being.

How, I wonder, do we adjust to software that attempts to do most of that for you? How do you get to know who you are when you've got a software program looking over your shoulder and telling you all about who you are with implacable inhuman data-driven assurance? It's a huge question and one that I feel unsure of how to answer. I wish the guys at Knewton shared a little bit of my fear and unsureness.

UPDATE: Twitter user Barmak Nassirian directed my attention to this article, which provides an even more complete view of exactly how Knewton thinks they can accomplish their goals. It confirms the impression that these are guys who know a lot more about data systems than about carbon based life forms. It's long-- but it's interesting reading.

"The New Intelligence" by Steve Kolowich. Inside Higher Ed.

Why Big Data

There are many fine fairy tales wrapped up in the big ball of reformy stuff rolling down Education Mountain these days. But one aspect of that reformy mess hasn't yet come up with any sort of plausible cover story at all.

National standards? I get that some people find the idea of country-wide consistency appealing. TFA? The idea that fresh-faced enthusiastic idealists can help in this country, kinda like the Peace Corps is attractive. Charter schools? A great harnessing of the American entrepreneurial spirit to provide unique educational experiences sounds exciting. Most of reformy stuff is sold with fairy tales which, while absolute unvarnished (well, actually, heavily varnished) baloney, have an understandable appeal.

Except Big Data.

Big Data has not even made sort of an attempt to create a rosy picture of our datafied future that would be enticing.

What is the appeal supposed to be? Am I supposed to imagine that I am sitting in my classroom, I am holding my head in hands thinking, "Damn, but after months of seeing these students face to face, I haven't the faintest clue what they have and have not mastered. If only there were a test I could send off to some super-cool data place far from here, and then they would send me back a report, and then I would know how my students are doing. Because what that job needs is somebody who is not in the room with them and never sees them and spends no time with them and is not actually a human being."

No, that's not the Big Data fairy tale.

Maybe it's supposed to be, "Give us all this data and we will be able to tell how students all across the country are doing, thereby effecting better instructional choices." Except that isn't a remotely convincing fairy tale, because in what universe does a classroom teacher say, "I can't really write my lesson plans for next week until I know how students in Alaska and Arkansas did on last spring's test."

Or occasionally we get something about personalized learning, which is just the newest version of the teaching machine idea floating around for decades. Because I can best compute a study program for you if I have information from millions of students who aren't you.

No, there's no convincing fairy tale about Why We Need Big Data, because Big Data has nothing at all to offer students, classroom teachers, or local school districts. There are only two remotely plausible reasons for the wholesale national collection, storage and sifting of student data.

1) Big Data wants the same thing in schools that they want in facebook and google. They want to collect maximum data because they can crunch it, use it for marketing purposes, and sell it to other people who want to do the same.

2) Big Data needs national data to make national decisions about national curriculum and national instructional strategies. The only school district that needs national data to make district instructional decisions is a national one.

We can continue to ask the Big Data giants like inBloom etc how much money they're making, why they get to end-run federal privacy rules, if they have solved any of the security problems, and who is holding the controls to this giant database. But the biggest question that remains unanswered with even the sort of pretty lie used to cover the tracks of other reformy stuffs is this one-- exactly WHY do we need to do this in the first place?

UPDATE:
Within an hour of posting this, I was directed to this article (hat tip to Laura Sanchez) which clarifies one other reason to want Big Data in schools-- by the time you have graduated, Big Data will already be telling future employers whether they want to hire you or not. Big Brother, it turns out, was a slacker.

Data Driven Drivel

To follow the current tempest over school reform, you would think that teachers are opposed to data. But isn't data good? And if we are going to collect data and use it to shape instruction, doesn't that make sense? If teachers don't like data-driven instruction, does that mean that they'd all rather design instruction based on oiuja boards and dowsing rods?

In fact, teachers aren't against data, and they find themselves in something of a rhetorical pickle, because on the one hand, we know that information and data are good, but on the other hand, our gut tells us that the data-driven fad is dehumanizing and bad for our students. But we have a hard time finding the right words. Let me take a shot at it.

The problem with the current data-collection fad is not that it collects too much data. It's that it doesn't collect enough.

Human beings are complicated and complex. All good teachers know that. It's why we collect data all the time. All. The. Time.

We go over a drill sheet on some simple skill. We call on students. We watch their responses. Did Johnny look puzzled or bored? Did Jane answer quickly, or do a lot of mulling? Did Ethel deliver and inspired insight or a lucky guess? Is Chris confused by the material or distracted by a fight with his best friend? Does Bob know how he got that answer, or did it come straight out his butt? We ask follow up questions, probe, watch carefully. We know there's a difference between a class that has a skill mastered and one that's just barely getting it, even if both classes get the same number of right answers.

We know all this because we collect literally thousands of data points, many of which boil down to verbal and non-verbal cues, and many of those we can interpret only because we've developed a relationship with the student. In the ten minutes it took to go over a simple worksheet, we have observed, gathered, sorted and collated thousands of data points.

These shiny new fancy data-collecting assessment whiz-bangs (available at a generous price from Pearson et al)-- how many data points do they collect?

One.

A score. A simple right or wrong number. They have to. It's all they can handle. If it's a complicated matter, they still reduce it to a fill-in-the-bubble, right-or-wrong, one-data-point number.

This is why these things are de-humanizing. Because human beings are complex creatures who generate wild and vibrant webs of complicated information, a complex of behavior so varied and stunning that the very computers that are used to analyze it cannot even begin to imitate it.

The data-driven craze is like a doctor who wants to diagnose a patient. She has available every test, every diagnostic, every lab facility in the world. But instead, she just writes down the patient's height and weight and calls it a day. Or posts it on her data wall.

We need to stop saying that we are opposed to data-driven instruction, because we're not-- we've been doing it for as long as we've been in a classroom. What we need to start saying is that the so-called data-driving tools that we're being offered (or forced) to use are crap, producing a thin sliver of useless data, a mere drop compared to the vast waterfalls of data available from the beautiful, varied human beings who are our students.

To data-driving assessment providers, we have to say, "I'm sorry that you're only capable of measuring a minute fraction of what I need to do my job. But you have to stop saying that because X is the only thing you can measure, X is the only thing that matters."