Datafication

Author: Kelsey Benson

Have you ever stopped to reflect on the process of getting to know someone? When hiring for a new job, for example, what important pieces of information make us comfortable putting our faith in a complete stranger? College GPA? Years of experience? How about deciding on a romantic partner; would you move in with someone without knowing their annual salary? Perhaps even their credit score? Even in the process of self-improvement, there are certain pieces of information we feel compelled to collect: number of steps taken each day, daily caloric intake, hours of sleep. And what do all these diverse data points have in common? They all come down to numbers. People are expected to make sense of the fast-paced and complex nature of the world we inhabit through numbers continuously thrown up by vast data collection and analysis networks. Numbers constitute metrics by which we can compare and value each aspect of our lives including ourselves and other humans.

Or, at least, such is the promise of neoliberal rationality. According to the neoliberal worldview, efficiency is king. As individuals (as well as at systemic levels, such as in institutions such as schools and government), we are enjoined to make ourselves as efficient and productive as possible. In order to be able to measure our productivity, however, we first need a standard against which we can quantify our performance. The American obsession on grades in schooling is a perfect example. What teacher has never given an assignment, only to have their students ask, “Will this be graded?” Students are motivated by being assigned a score out of 100, a completely arbitrary metric of success—the French system, as another example, assigns grades out of 20—instead of being motivated by the desire to better themselves, or by the intrinsic value of the skills and information they are learning. Assigning numbers to every aspect of our daily lives gives us a simple method for self-monitoring to ensure that we are rising to the challenges of a capitalist system that demands continuous growth.

But is this “datafication” of everyday life necessarily a good thing? In the particular case of teachers, what does the tendency to quantify, standardize, and measure every aspect of teaching and learning really mean for our students, our teaching, and our own lives?

How does Datafication Impact Teachers?

Datafication follows measurement and standardization of key aspects of public education. To standardize roughly means coming up with a scale, or a standard, against which one can then supposedly “measure” performance. In teaching and learning, the neoliberal push for standardization has led to an array of increasingly specific tools available for administrators, politicians, and policymakers to use when assessing students and evaluating teachers. Large-scale data – drawn primarily from student standardized test scores—used to evaluate teacher effectiveness has come to be known as (VAM). Supposedly, these VAM employ statistical models that can compare the contribution of one teacher to a student’s academic achievement to the predicted achievement levels of similar students and teachers around the country and world. As an administrator or a lawmaker, that sound great, right? An easy number that we can slap on each teacher’s evaluation that tells us exactly how good she or they are: how intoxicatingly simple!

As the adage goes, things are not always as they seem. There are several problems with the use of VAM to gauge teacher performance. To begin, these performance indicators assume that every student has an equal opportunity to succeed in our current education system, and that all teachers teach similar groups of students. Unfortunately, America’s public schools are wrought with issues of racial injustice, xenophobia, unequal school funding, and language barriers which complicate daily life for millions of America students. Even a highly skilled teacher would be at a disadvantage proving his or her worth with students whose test scores are impacted by the burden of additional impediments to learning, such as English language learners and students with disabilities. As educators, we know that a solitary number is not enough to tell the complex story of a child’s life. Without attempting to control for the number of other factors impacting academic achievement, student growth measures are simply not a reliable way to evaluate teacher effectiveness.

In addition, there is the question of how the contribution of one individual teacher can truly be isolated from the other factors influencing child growth and development. For example, in middle school a student may have seven different classes with 12 or 13 different teachers (if they are co-taught, for example). If a student just happens to have an incredible Reading teacher one year, then we might expect their abilities in reading comprehension and fluency to increase dramatically. However, reading is the critical access point for all academic content area classes, not just Reading. If their marvelous teacher has in fact increased their reading ability, then these improvements would undoubtedly also transfer to other areas. Even if they have an incredibly “bad” Social Studies teacher, for example, simply being a better reader should allow them to make improvements in that class. So how do we isolate the effects of the amazing Reading teacher from those of the ineffective Social Studies teacher? The neoliberal logic of standardization and measurement assume that we have a perfect process for translating student achievement into numerical data on teacher quality, which is clearly not always the case.

Teachers are not the only victims of the datafication of education. Schools and districts are also under constant pressure to produce results. In the state of Georgia, a clear example of this phenomenon can be found in the College and Career Readiness Performance Index, or CCRPI score (measured out of 100).

This number supposedly provides a standard by which every single school in every diverse corner of the state can be compared, using data on student and teacher attendance, number of office referrals, student transiency rates, and of course, standardized test scores.

Click here for a 15 page explanation of how CCRPI is calculated. CCRPI is just one of many different metrics used to label certain schools as high-performing, while labeling others (and, indirectly, the educators who work there) as failing. Branding a school as failing opens up a Pandora’s Box of scrutiny to which local principals are pressured to respond, a pressure which rolls downhill onto the shoulders of stressed out teachers and anxious students. The callous rationality of standardized metrics like CCRPI fail to account for inequitable levels of financial and community support structures across schools and districts. Instead, all schools are reduced to a simple number, thereby erasing the circumstances which resulted in “failure” and placing the entire burden of responsibility for low test scores on the backs of teachers and students. Moreover, these ratings systems are far from culturally neutral; by and large, they tend to reflect middle class and white values systems, and therefore privilege such communities over their more diverse and economically depressed counterparts. Being labeled as “failing” by unfair ranking systems serves to justify privatization of education through the charter school movement, such as the Opportunity school district in Georgia, which further depress low-income communities by draining monies from public schools while enriching private education companies to the tune of billions of dollars of profit annually.

What does all this Mean for Teaching and Learning in the United States?

The neoliberal imperative to standardize everything—student performance, school efficacy, teacher effectiveness—into terms that can be measured, and thereby compared across different contexts, has far-reaching implications for equity in American education. Because the majority of the VAM used to evaluate teacher and school performance are rooted in standardized test scores, many low-income schools end up being labeled as failing—schools which disproportionately serve students of color. Standardized tests privilege certain skills, such as the ability to sit still and quiet and concentrate for hours at a time, that are cultural norms mostly in middle and upper class white communities. The multi-billion dollar industry that creates standardized assessments would have us all believe that these tests are pure, unbiased measures of student aptitude; yet the concurrent success of a multi-billion dollar test-prep industry, which sells wealthy students the skills needed to improve their scores, suggests that this is clearly a fabrication. Lower performance in communities that do not have access to private tutors and test-prep materials, nor the cultural currency required to navigate the system, makes students of color and their teachers appear inferior and renders them highly visible as failures. This damaging rhetoric only contributes to the historical forces of oppression and institutionalized racism which have been attacking low-income children of color for generations. In this way, the neoliberal logic of standardization and measurement is part of a system of logic which supports classism and racism.

For the rapidly shifting role of teachers in an increasingly standardized school context, the picture is even more complex. The incessant drive to quantify and measure every aspect of teaching pedagogy can lead to what is known as “value orders schizophrenia”. This refers to the environment of perpetual uncertainty and instability experienced by some teachers whose job performance is endlessly monitored and judged by changing demands and expectations. In this context, teachers can never be sure if they’re doing enough for their students, leading to a feeling of disempowerment when their professional judgment and individual autonomy in the classroom is constantly questioned. Increasing competition and decreasing job security are the new normal when performance is gauged exclusively by student test performance. As professionals and educators, we know that our students have needs that cannot be measured on a standardized test. They need caring, support, and love from the people in whose hands they must trust their futures. When the only things that seem to matter in teaching anymore are test scores and student growth measures, teachers are caught between their moral obligation to their students as individuals, and their professional obligation to do as their district and principal command.

How can Teachers Fight Back?

In order to swim against the rising tides of standardization and measurement in public education, reform must be reclaimed as a democratic movement. We must say goodbye to the days when standardized tests were allowed to define poor black and brown children as deficient when access to a quality education that has never been fair or equal. We must say goodbye to corporate reformers obsessed with measurements that degrade our public schools in order to justify dismantling public education and instead funneling taxpayer monies into for-profit companies selling the promise of a “better” education. We must say goodbye to the soulless market rationality that reduces our children and their teachers to a number. The way forward in education must be rooted in a liberatory, critical pedagogy that openly rejects standardization, measurement, and above all, high-stakes testing. If we are to uphold the value of education as a critical element of freedom in a democratic society, then education can no longer be allowed to be a tool of repression and conformity. Our curriculum, our teaching, and our students’ souls are only impoverished when the only forms of knowledge we reward in schools are easily and unproblematically measured, leaving abstract character traits like care, empathy, and collaboration to be systematically devalued. Schools and teachers must be allowed to teach our students skills and values that seek validation from the local community and not from some abstract, decontextualized metrics.

Some advocates across the nation have begun to take matters into their own hands. For instance, teachers’ unions in New York have begun encouraging parents to take part in the growing "Opt Out" movement, wherein parents simply decline to have their students participate in standardized tests. A Teacher’s Union in New Jersey financed an ad campaign featuring a distraught father telling the story of his son crying over tests. In many cases, parents have united on social media over a shared feeling that teachers are being muzzled in their classrooms, unable to speak out against a repressive system of emotional violence against children for fear of losing their jobs. Through political activism, teachers, collective unions, and even parents are uniting as part of a growing push to deprive neoliberalism of the competitive fuel it requires to survive and justify its own existence: namely, big data. Without available testing data necessary to define children and their teachers as “failing”, the neoliberal drive to standardize, measure, and compare children across the country dies like a fire without oxygen. If we wish to push back against a system that disempowers teachers, reproduces inequality, and denies our children the democratic promise of a quality education, then we must find a path forward rooted in a critical pedagogy that rejects the high-stakes testing in which the seeds of neoliberal logic in education are sown.