Data mining embeds student information into the digital footprint forever - but worse -
John King and company are manipulating this highly personal information to "demonstrate"
that our public school system is "failing" our students. Carol Burris, principal of Southside High School, NY discovers egregiously inaccurate tracking of her students.
" The list did not include the names of many former students who
were attending private and public colleges and universities, both in and
out of state. I began calling families to verify the report.
There were 53 names that did not have a college listing. By 5 p.m. that
day, I had spoken with 27 families. In 25 of the 27 cases, the students
were thriving in their third year of college. They were at Brown, Bard,
Cornell, Bentley, Notre Dame and Wesleyan."
Read the rest of her article via Valerie Strauss' column in the Washington Post below:
Principal uncovers flawed data in her state’s official education reports
New York State Education Commissioner John King, (Mike Groll/AP File Photo)
School
reformers talk nonstop about using “data” to drive policy, teaching and
just about everything else, which, you would think, would require that
the data being used be accurate. The following post exposes a troubling
problem with the push for “data-driven” everything — bad data. This
important piece was written by award-winning Principal Carol Burris of
South Side High School in New York, who was named New York’s 2013 High
School Principal of the Year by the School Administrators Association of
New York and the National Association of Secondary School Principals,
and in 2010, tapped as the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by
the School Administrators Association of New York State. Burris has been
exposing the botched school reform program in New York for years on
this blog, and it is worth reading. You can see some of her earlier
posts
By Carol Burris
The New York State
Education Department (NYSED) has once again demonstrated its uncanny
ability to forge ahead without regard for the facts.
In its zest
to prove there is a crisis of college readiness, combined with a
sweetheart infatuation with big data, NYSED produced reports (SIRS
601-604) to track New York high school graduates’ college enrollment. A
few days before the public release of the reports, Deputy Commissioner
Ken Wagner sent a memo to districts. He explained that the department
had combined school data with that of the National Student Clearinghouse
to document which former high school students were enrolled in college
and whether they persisted in their studies.
The memo informed
superintendents that after the Regents discussed the data, it would be
publicly released because it would be of interest to communities.
Our
district data coordinator, who is my assistant principal, brought me
the SIRS report. It claimed that only 80 percent of our students from
the cohort of 2008 (Class of 2012) were enrolled in college. As soon
as I saw the number, I knew it was not correct. Ninety-eight percent of
the 2012 Class told us they were going to college and gave us the name
of the college they would attend. Might some have left after one
semester, or changed their minds? It’s possible. But I found it
difficult to believe that 18 percent had either not enrolled or quickly
dropped out.
I asked my assistant principal to drill down to the
names in the SIRS report. Not only were the names given, the report
included which colleges and universities the students attended, their
race, special education status, whether or not they received free or
reduced priced lunch, and in many cases, their college major. This
massive collection of data on graduates made my jaw drop.
And then I looked at the names. The 2012 salutatorian wasn’t
on the list. I began a name by name comparison of the cohort against the
report. The list did not include the names of many former students who
were attending private and public colleges and universities, both in and
out of state.
I began calling families to verify the report.
There were 53 names that did not have a college listing. By 5 p.m. that
day, I had spoken with 27 families. In 25 of the 27 cases, the students
were thriving in their third year of college. They were at Brown, Bard,
Cornell, Bentley, Notre Dame and Wesleyan. One student was in the Naval
Academy (which smartly and ironically is one of the few schools that
does not share data), and another at Tufts. One was at the University of
Florida and another at the University of Charleston. What was even more
bizarre was that some were in New York State public colleges governed
by NYSED—SUNY Buffalo, SUNY Binghamton, SUNY Stony Brook and
Queensborough Community College. One student had already graduated from a
technical school with a 3.84 GPA. Eighty percent had now become over 90
percent, and over the course of the next few days the percentage would
continue to climb. This was no small error.
When calling, I asked
parents whether they had “opted out” of having their son’s or
daughter’s college enrollment data collected. They had not. One mom
said: “Honestly, if I knew about it, I would have opted out. It is not
John King’s[1] business where my son goes to college or what his major is.”
The
error was not limited to Rockville Centre. Ken Mitchell, Superintendent
of Schools of the South Orangetown Central School District, discovered
that 80 of his 2012 graduates who were attending college were not on the
list of attendees. On the SIRS report, The New York State Education
Department gave a 62 percent college going rate for his district,
although the true number was 89 percent.
In an article entitled
“Educators livid over college ‘success’ report,” four other districts
reported error rates that ranged from 15 percent to 27 percent. Harrison
Schools’ Superintendent, Lou Wool, characterized the NYSED report as
“irresponsible” and said that it was part of an agenda designed to
convince the public “that public schools were failing.”
From APPR
scores that do not add up, to a disastrous rollout of the Common Core
and its testing, the New York State Education Department has
inexplicably gotten a pass on a series of blunders. But there are
implications regarding this latest error that go well beyond New York.
Apparently
one of the many “holes” in the Clearinghouse data, according to NYSED,
is that students who do not receive financial aid in some schools are
excluded .
No matter what the reasons for error, many of our schools’ highest
achievers—students who are likely to persist and who do not need
remediation were not reported. Other excluded students are those who
attend the military academies, who opt out of data collection, who
attend colleges outside of the United States, or who attend colleges
that do not share data. And of course there are always errors in
matching the databases.
Because of all of the problems described,
it is reasonable to question the veracity of many of the national
claims regarding college readiness. We have been bombarded by “data” on
remediation and the lack of college readiness, and this “data” is used
to justify Common Core reform. In some cases, the data is pure
exaggeration as I have written about here and here and here.
However, because NYSED created this report which allows us to “peek
inside,” we now know that there are serious problems at the very source.
In a news report, Deputy Commissioner Wagner claimed the error rate was
3 percent, because that was the error rate allegedly found by the New
York City public schools. This does not conform, however, with the very
large rates of error that individual districts are finding.
Flawed
reports such as these reflect the mindset of those who are infatuated
with data, and who jump to use it when it confirms their belief that
schools are not doing a good job. NYSED included the results in a Powerpoint narrative
of how unprepared our students are for college. Superintendent Donahue
of Byram Hills Schools referring to NYSED said that “once again, the
confidence that they put in data is misplaced.” That is a generous
understatement. What happened in New York should be a cautionary tale
for all.
[1] John King is the New York State Commissioner of Education
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