CBE & The Data Bottleneck
Can you tell I've been doing a lot of reading about Competency Based Education lately?
While some proponents like to point to more human-friendly versions of CBE such as a personalized district in rural Alaska, the more common picture of CBE is of a huge data-mining monstrosity. And while CBE has been rolling steadily at us under various aliases for a few decades now, it is computer technology that has made it look like both achievable and profitable.
In fact, CBE on the ground really does look like one more variation of the old and failed teaching machines, an intent to convert the entire ed system to the failed model of Rocketship Academy or the very failed model of on-line schooling.
You don't have to dig very far for hints about where CBE is headed. One of the flagship groups leading the charge is iNACOL -- which stands for "International Association for K-12 Online Learning." You can find their logo on works like the report presented by CompetencyWorks (what the hell is it with these guys and smooshedtogether group names?) entitled Re-Engineering Information Technology, a report all about how to redesign your IT systems to accommodate CBE.
Like many CBE fans, these guys are wrestling with the challenge of collecting tons of data, crunching it, making it transparent to students and teachers, and using it to make quick decisions about what should happen next in the student's education.
I'm hearing and reading the stories from teachers on the ground, in classrooms that are in part or in full running CBE, and they all seem to be about getting data through the bottleneck. Teachers who spend hours plugging test/quiz/worksheet scores into their platform. Teachers who maintain data walls on steroids so that students can walk into the room and first thing in the morning see where they are on the standards matrix and task completion matrix. Teachers who are directed to keep CURMUDGUCATION: CBE & The Data Bottleneck: