Yelp! … But For Schools?!
Is it a good idea to label schools with a really simple star-rating?
Can we do for Education and schools what Yelp has done for eating and restaurants?
No! Of course not.
And we all know it. It’s not just that summarizing a complex ecosystem like a school via one, single number is simplistic. It’s not just that your child’s needs are different from my child’s even while both may be served perfectly well (even mutually beneficially) in adjacent seats. It’s not just that your opinion being different from mine might not reflect our legitimate, genuine differences.
It’s that an opinion aggregator like Yelp is fundamentally, technically different from the “School Performance Framework (SPF)” LAUSD resolved to develop for stakeholders in spring of 2018. On further reflection the school board will be reconsidering the summative framework (the wording of this resolution is here, at “tab 26”) at its BOE meetings next month.
Yelp works by taking a hard number, your assessment, and “averaging” that opinion with everyone else’s. Statistical theory shows that with enough of these assessments, they will fall out in a bell curve shape with the peak being the “best guess” of “most” folks’ opinion.
The School Performance Framework would cough up a single number just like Yelp does, but it’s derived completely differently. The SPF depends on a guess, an estimate, instead of simply characterizing hard data. (The leap of faith in Yelp CONTINUE READING: Yelp! … But For Schools?! – redqueeninla
