The Data Gap

Arne Duncan wants new kinds of data from states.  While governors will get billions in stimulus money right away, the second half of the dough will be held until states get straight.  According to the Times,

The data is likely to reveal that in many states, tests have been dumbed down so that students score far higher than on tests administered by the federal Department of Education.

It will also probably show that many local teacher-evaluation systems are so perfunctory that they rate 99 of every 100 teachers as excellent and that diplomas often mean so little that millions of high school graduates each year must enroll in remediation classes upon entering college.

Yes.  It will show both of those things.  Math teacher friends of mine joke about how absurdly easy some exams have gotten as New York has tried to raise test scores.  It’s like watching a bad limbo contest.

But still, while I am all on board with holding school systems more accountable, what these systems do as businesses differs from what teachers do in classrooms.  Data can indeed be gathered about how money is spent: fire up the spreadsheets!  Data can’t be gathered as easily about how students learn.  What does learning look like?

In Disrupting Class, Christensen describes tries to reiterate Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences premise: each student learns differently.  He comes from a business management perspective, which reveals itself several times as he conveys his affection for data and numbers and charts.  Nevertheless, he maintains that education must give students individual room to learn at their own individual pace.  For him, this is where online learning comes in.

Policy makers and scholars and teachers must come to terms with their competing definitions of data.  Until the differences between types of data are addressed openly, students will continue to fall deeper and deeper into the Data Gap.

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