You’ve got to wonder what it means for teachers and students when one of SFUSD’s big data toys “achievement management systems” actually struts a positive reference from crazy Tom Friedman, the One True Wanker of the Decade (the vid is priceless):
On schoolLoop.com you can track your kid’s homework assignments and daily progress in every K-12 class. A most e-mailed list is coming to a job near you.
Such high praise from a Very Serious Person will probably inspire a SchoolLoop offshoot (pun intended), a body-count management system for deployment on drones.
Who else’s “data” will SchoolSnoop track? Not mine. Folllowing Melville’s scrivener, “I would prefer not to.” Retirement has its advantages.
“When the [reformers] say that instruction must be ‘evidence-based,’ and ‘data-driven,’ they don’t mean that schools and teachers should be guided by statistical studies. When they say ‘data-driven,’ they mean breaking down jobs into tasks, breaking tasks into components, and then measuring and quantifying each component to develop target work norms. The norms are used to establish new conditions of work and workplace discipline. These are used to impose scripted learning, narrow ‘teach to the test’ curricula, canned software, and cyber-schools.” Jack Gerson in “The Neo Liberal Agenda and Teachers’ Unions,” in The Assault on Public Education, p. 110.
Weeding the Collection 