Data is Dehumanizing

The LA times published an analysis of value added test score data in an attempt to identify the "best" and "worst" teachers. But the whole thing is a sham because we end up talking about data when we should be talking about learning.

If you want to know how well someone can play baseball, you don't give them a test - you watch them play baseball.

The same goes for teachers. 

If you want to know how well someone teaches, you have to go watch them teach. Trusting indirect assessments such as test scores to properly inform us who the best and worst teachers are is lazy, cheap and grossly inaccurate. In other words, its education malpractice.

Now that Michelle Rhee and Arne Duncan both openly support the release of  teachers' names and their label of either 'effective' or 'ineffective' based on test score data, they are leaders in education malpractice.

The problems here are many. Here's an incomplete list:

• Value Added Measurement is far from an authentic way to measure anything.
• Standardized Testing is not about measuring real learning; it's about ranking and sorting. Separate the wheat from the chaff
• No one knows better than teachers how to evaluate teachers.
• Noninstructional factors explain most of the variance among test scores when schools or districts are compared.
• There's more to school than teachers.
• The best kind of teacher professional development comes from teachers working with teachers.
• 90% of the variances in test scores can be attributed to factors outside of teacher control.

The greatest failure of trusting test scores more than teachers is that teachers might know more about how to improve a student's test score than they know the student.

Data is dehumanizing.