Big Data, Algorithms, and Professional Judgment in Reforming Schools (Part 1) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Big Data, Algorithms, and Professional Judgment in Reforming Schools (Part 1) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:

Big Data, Algorithms, and Professional Judgment in Reforming Schools (Part 1)

by larrycuban

The crusade among reformers for data-driven decision-making in classrooms, schools, and districts didn’t just begin in the past decade. Its roots go back to Frederick Winslow Taylor‘s “scientific management” movement a century ago. In the decade before World War I and through the 1930s, borrowing from the business sector where Taylorism reigned, school boards and superintendent adopted wholesale ways of determining educational efficiency producing a Niagara Falls of data which policymakers used to drive the practice of daily schooling.
Before there were IBM punchcards, before there were the earliest computers, there were city-wide surveys, school scorecards, and  statistical tables recording the efficiency and effectiveness of principals, teachers, and students. And, yes, there were achievement test scores as well.
In Raymond Callahan’s Education and The Cult Of Efficiency (1962), he documents Newton (MA) superintendent Frank Spaulding telling fellow superintendents at the annual conference of the National Education Association in 1913 how he “scientifically managed” his district (Review of Callahan book). The crucial task, Spaulding told his peers, was for district officials to measure school “products or results” and thereby compare “the efficiency of