A thoughtful program can prepare students to be consumers of research, but also be able to access and analyze data to improve their organizations.
I think the EdD program has definitely introduced us to research, how it's used, and how to prepare for our own research. I have since moved into the REM (research and eval methods) courses over the past year in order to fulfill the "access and analyze data" part of my knowledge base, and it's been so helpful.
By coupling lessons on basic and advanced statis-tics with data-based applied learning opportunities, students retain more of the content that traditionally makes up the quantitative methods course of an education leadership program
Retention of this stuff is hard unless you are using it all the time. I took basic and intermediate stats in the past year and because I don't use them in my every day, I have lost some of what I learned and spent a lot of time learning.
how quantitative data analyses can inform educa-tional equity and the public good.
I think it shoud also highlight what this class does: that data can be used/skewed for less than good purposes and how to watch out for that.
However, for Texas, the graph depicts a spike just before 8.5% of students in special education and a dip just after 8.5% of students in special education. The graph shows that districts in Texas were more likely to have just below 8.5% of students in special education than they were to have just above 8.5% of students in special education, suggesting that districts were responding to the 8.5% target included in the Texas Performance-Based Monitoring Analysis System (TPBMAS).
Sheesh. They didn't really hide what they were doing if you knew where/how to look.
relatively straightforward measures, based on publicly available data, can be (and could have been) used to identify non-compliance with the Child Find requirements of IDEA
Why isn't there a system/department that regularly audits these programs across the nation? This seems like pretty important information to know when we are discussing a variety of different sub populations.
The presence of academic faculty or researchers in think tanks and advocacy organizations was noticeably absent from this process, despite more than 10 years of data that could have highlighted and reformed TEA’s policy years sooner.
Yes! It is very obvious that educators/families/advocates/experts were not a part of this process.
Teachers reported to special education advocacy groups the use of Response to Intervention as a mechanism for delaying special education evaluation
Yes! Answered my previous wondering. I didn't think educators would stand by seeing students with obvious needs being denied.
PBMAS indicator.
I scrolled through a lot of these PBMAS manuals and not once do I see a reference to research-backed information or a reference page at the end. Makes me question the validity of any of this, but it's also Texas so...
Under TEA’s Performance-Based Monitoring Analysis System (PBMAS), districts received a perfect rating if the percent of students in the district identified as children with disabilities under IDEA was below 8.5. The Office of Special Education Programs concluded that the PBMAS rating system effectively placed “caps” on the number of students that districts could identify as needing special education services
I wonder how the service providers/educators felt about the pushback for this.
lack of genuine concern c
This is exactly it. People pretend to care until they are asked to speak up, advocate, fight for change. Then suddenly it's crickets.
aven't done any of those things." I cont
The denial runs deep.
When we speak of an education debt we move to a discourse that holds us all accountable. It
Educators are surrounded by the buzzword "accountability" yet it's always coming from people/admin that rarely apply it to themselves.
It appeals to those who fear poor children and children of color and as a result they often are obsessed with contro
I know educators like this. You'd think they would just find a different job.
re of poverty myth. Teachers and administrators assume that poor children are so inherently different that they cannot be treated with dignity and humanity. They are trained to not place high academic expectations on these children because the primary purpose of school is to bring
And then this trickles down to the student who comes to believe that they are not smart/worthy/capable.
The myth is aggravating on a more visceral level because poverty is not a culture. It is a condition produced by the economic, social, and political arrangements of a society. Poverty is linked to the values of a
Love this quote.
We struggled to get our children to school on time and yet the meaning placed on our actions was quite different
It is absolutely a double standard.
pports. The poor are deeply committed to and invested in education as the primary vehicle for lifting them out of poverty. The rich often see education
YES
dergarten? Now we learn that children who do not know their colors, their shapes, how to count from 1 to 20, and how to recite the alphabet are not "ready" to attend school. What are the children supp
As an early childhood teacher, I cannot tell you how many parents focus on the "academics" of preschool. Are they ready? What can we do? I'm like, let them be kids. They will have PLENTY of time in kinder and beyond to nail down those academics. Preschool is about socializing students, introducing them to a different environment, showing them how learning can be fun. What a concept, right?
he problem with this syndrome is not only do teachers focus their energy on sympathizing, but this sympathy also turns into a set of excuses for why they cannot expect much academically from underserved students
Much like the savior complex of many (white) educators.
rents showed up. My colleagues were shocked but they never acknowledged that they had not really tried to facilitate
Instead of complaining, imagine what these educators could accomplish if they problem solved.
• The parents just don't care • These children don't have enough exposure/experiences • These children aren't ready for school • Their families don't value education • They are coming from a "culture of po
i have heard every single one of these phrases during my time as an educator. I don't understand why you would want to be a teacher if you are unable to see the bias that these words carry.
We also fail to discuss the health gap.
Yes! I have read articles about how students in lower socioeconomic levels are more likely to have poor attendance because they are sick more often and for longer because they do not have the same access to healthcare.
Even if we cannot prove that schools are poorly funded because Black and Latino students attend them, we can demonstrate that the amount of funding increases with the rise in the White student population.
This reminds me of what a teacher friend of mine calls the "White flight", meaning when students of color begin to move into a certain area and enroll in schools the White students begin to leave to other schools.
It comes to us as if the students are not doing their part. We hear nothing of the other "gaps" that plague the lives of poor children of color.
I still don't understand why we are always so focused on the score and not the human behind the score.
ispanic/Latino students were not tested as a separate group before 197
What group were they in then? Or were they just not tested at all?
hus, the primary premise of closing the gap rests on a notion of slowed performance at the top while there is simultaneous increased performance at the lower levels.
For as much as this has been discussed throughout my almost decade of teaching, I never really thought of it like this and it's genius.
Looking at our current educational problems as an "achievement gap
I love this. If we put the same effort into solving the problem as we do perpetuating it, things would be much different.
This is in part because of a lack of diversity among algorithm designers, and a lack of train-ing about the social and historical context of their work,
This is why DEI work is so critical to all career paths.
Obermeyer is working with the firm without salary to improve the algorithm.
Obermeyer could have absolutely capitalized on this for money. Great to know that he is helping to help and not for financial gain.
nly 17.7% of patients that the algorithm assigned to receive extra care were black. The researchers calculate that the proportion would have been 46.5% if the algorithm was unbiased.
That is a very large difference.
n algorithm widely used in US hospi-tals to allocate health care to patients has been systematically discriminat-ing against black people
I feel like I should be shocked, but sadly, I am not.
Opacity, Scale,and Damage
While these are all important, Damage is the one that worries me the most. I think about this a lot when preparing for my DRP. I never want to intentionally harm anyone, and there's so much data that could be skewed, misrepresented that I need to take into consideration to make sure I am telling my participants' stories while also respecting their confidentiality and experiences.
While many may benefit from it, itleads to suffering for others.
I think some of these models were created with good intentions, but as we have seen, it depends on who is using it and how.
Even if the participant is aware of being modeled, orwhat the model is used for, is the model opaque, or even invisible?
This is where it gets sketchy...not knowing the purpose or who has access to it.
Colorado
This is so interesting. Will be Google-ing this info later!
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, sentences imposed onblack men in the federal system are nearly 20 percent longer than thosefor whites convicted of similar crimes. And though they make up only 13percent of the population, blacks fill up 40 percent of America’s prisoncells.
These statistics are so depressing.
“Yes,” Quijano answered. The prosecutor stressed that testimony in hersummation, and the jury sentenced Buck to death.
There are no words for how I felt reading this.
That generates a binary prediction that all people of thatrace will behave that same way.
This reminds me of the PredPol from the Feminism reading last week and the overpolicing based on faulty/incomplete/not updated data.
while ignoring how much theteachers engage the students, work on specific skills, deal with classroommanagement, or help students with personal and family problems
This sums up what teacher evaluation is. I get that it needs to show that our students are learning, but there are so many different ways we support students that are never taken into account. UGH.
There would always be mistakes, however, because models are, by theirvery nature, simplifications. No model can include all of the real world’scomplexity or the nuance of human communication.
Great quote
The other, while cloaked in mystery, appears to lean heavilyon a handful of test results from one year to the next.
This absolutely describes teacher evaluations.
statistical rigor
I have been to many baseball games and never understood the stats, but this is interesting.
Everyone has access to the stats andcan understand more or less how they’re interpreted.
Everyone has access. I like it.