#The hamster wheel of life full#
Specials teachers complain that they are forced to create the same data as all the other teachers in their school, sometimes multiple, huge binders full of data, but then no one gives that data more than a cursory look. I strongly suspect that excessive demands for data not only reflect this lack of progress - THEY CREATE A PORTION OF THE LOST LEARNING WE ARE BUSY DOCUMENTING. In some locations, scores have been declining over time despite this full court data press. The time to prepare data is taken out of lesson preparation, grading, tutoring, materials preparation, and other student-centered activities.Īnd to what end? Our international test scores remain fairly stagnant. But data demands have been exploding in the recent past, and I wrote this post to highlight one point: Data demands have opportunity costs. Data is required so educators can determine how well instruction is working. I am by no means against gathering and analyzing educational data. Time is stolen from lesson preparation all up and down the line, until buying lessons from Teachers Pay Teachers becomes some teachers’ only hope, while others use required lesson plans that they know are not as good as what they might be able to prepare themselves - if given back the time stolen by Spreadsheet #42.
The shift toward multiple choice has come about in part because those tests are good standardized test practice, but also because data requirements frequently don’t leave a whole evening or day to grade students’ essays properly - or even to grade piles of essays at all.Įduhonesty: The opportunity costs from gathering data are kneecapping education. After complying with data requirements, many teachers don’t have time to grade such tests. For example, essay tests have mostly become a thing of the past. The opportunity costs are impossible to track. The hours spent at computers and in subsequent meetings and trainings are harder to track. Those old-fashioned dollar losses from stacks of paper and ink at least highlighted wastage sometimes, as recycling bins and waste paper baskets filled up. The cost of data gathering goes unremarked too often, especially now that most data lives out its life electronically. But nothing changed and the tests kept being handed to me along with threats if I resisted those useless tests and quizzes. I proved and proved that my students could not read the Common Core tests I was obliged to give, explained the problem with giving 7th grade tests in English to bilingual students who were reading English at a third grade level and sometimes Spanish at an even lower level.
We were kept on the common lesson plan whether our students could read and understand the questions or not. None of the spreadsheets from my last year before retirement affected instruction. Somebody’s great idea creates days of extra work throughout a school, but then no administrator ever finds time to sit down with the resulting forms and spreadsheets to figure out what the numbers reveal. Many teachers are forced to compile, record and keep data that is never ever used. There may be no growth or slightly less than one year’s growth.
When the results show annual growth of 1.05 years from a benchmark test, that may be presented as “has shown dramatic improvement until our 2nd grade is exceeding expectations and producing over a year’s academic improvement now!” Ummm… That 0.05 growth above the 1.0? That 0.05 may not be statistically meaningful. It’s a short step from optimistic interpretation to deceit. In honest hands, this manipulation does not usually produce misleading results - although not all data handlers know the meaning of the numbers they crunch and some may boldly assert “facts” unsupported by their numbers - but many stakeholders in education are under pressure to produce results.
The problem with evidence as defined by test scores is that data can always be manipulated. Click on the pics to appreciate the full ugliness.
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