Just another spoke in a great big wheel

The New York City Department of Education has been making a concerted effort to standardize school level data so that it is easily accessible and comprehensible to outsiders (for the purposes of this blog, an outsider is either a consultant/vendor or a DoE employee without pedagogical experience who reports to a non-teaching worksite. In plain language, a young Tweed suit who knows Jack about teaching.)

They want to have all of your students’ test scores, at Tweed, at the push of a button. Why?

They started last Spring. In high schools, all of our courses have new codes this year. Want to know why? We were forced to adopt new codes so that the management vultures could evaluate our schools without talking to us. Want to know what’s funny? They still couldn’t figure them out. We had too many permutations of courses, too many variations, too many pacings, levels, ways of dividing stuff up. In the biggest single flop, they insisted we designate each course as “core” or “not” meaning needed for graduation, or not. But as any teacher could have told them, we often do not know in advance if a course will be used to meet a graduation requirement. Flop, flop, flop. Know what’s not funny? Changing all those codes confused us, and students, and colleges, for no reason. Know what else isn’t funny? They are still trying.

The Data is You

(below the fold —->)

They are trying harder now. Feel like you’re being followed? You are. Over the last month the programmer in your school has been instructed to tie your id to your class lists (via your doe email account). Why? They are telling the programmers it’s so teachers can track their students’ progress. Lie. Way before HSST I tracked my students’ progress (in a huge, overcrowed Bronx high school). And now, with HSST, we can get scholarship reports segmented by teacher (we can track our own progress). No, here’s what’s new: other people can track your students’ grades and test scores. Other people, out of the building. Other people, who’ve never met you. Junior Tweed Suits. Hearing Officers. Bonus Supervisors. And since they’ve already lied to us about why they are doing this, we won’t know until they do it. Maybe they don’t know yet. But this is Tweed. There is no good explanation coming, unless it’s untrue, and there’s no true explanation coming unless it’s ungood.