Buried in Data | Deborah Meier on Education

Buried in Data | Deborah Meier on Education:

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Buried in Data

by debmeier

The first of the five habits which the schools I helped found were based on was: “What’s the evidence” How do you know that?”

The education debate–especially the one about the value of the data–is one that has largely ignored that number one “habit of mind” that defines being “well-educazted”. It’s hard for me to praise David Brooks, since we so often disagree, but he went up in my esteem on February 18th in a column entitled What Data Can’t Do. :The big novelty of this historic moment is that our lives are not mediated through data-collecting computers. In this world, data cab be used to make sense of mind-bogglingxly complex situations,,,help compensate for our overconfidence in our own intuition…But there are many things that big data does poorly…” The whole piece is worth reading . Then follow it with Paul Thomas of Chalk Dust blog who raises a critical question about the expertise of the expertise that most of us depend on.: “The disturbing irony is that among all the political and media focus on teacher quality and accountability, politicians and the media themselves fail to provide the