‘Data’ is not neutral! The point of collecting data on teachers and schools was always about control, pushing down pay, cutting benefits and cutting funding. That’s why these monitoring programs started, and continued to exist. A few naive people think that they might have some use in monitoring standards between schools, THEY DON’T. Pearson, Springer, and the other large education companies suck up much of the funding…not to the benefit of classrooms and students.
Don’t live in an political bubble. For years lefty teachers fought rankings, standardized testing, and the standardized testing industry. It doesn’t help schools, or teachers. Don’t be a knee-jerk reactionary, automatically saying that everything Musk does is wrong is counterproductive.
I don’t like Musk, but this is good. School performance tracking is voodoo math. Everyone knows that good schools are in good neighborhoods and bad schools are in bad neighborhoods. You don’t need $900,000,000 in research, and the yearly publication of random lists. This just hurts individual teachers.
I don’t think data and studies should ever be buried. I do think we need to do a better job of exposing this data as nothing more than scattered tea leaves, with no validity to it. Just because someone spent lots of money collecting numbers, doesn’t mean those numbers reflect anything real. And yes billions of dollars and hours of time can be spent collecting ‘data’, but the cost doesn’t mean it’s reflective of any truth.