Data Abuse – When Transient Kids Fall Through the Cracks of Crunched Numbers
I was teaching my classes.
I was grading assignments.
I was procrastinating.
I should have been working on my class rosters.
My principals wanted me to calculate percentages for every student I had taught that year and submit them to the state.
How long had each student been in my grade book? What percentage of the year was each learner in my class before they took their standardized tests?
If I didn’t accurately calculate this in the next few days, the class list generated by the computer would become final, and my evaluation would be affected.
But there I was standing before my students doing nothing of any real value – teaching.
I was instructing them in the mysteries of subject-verb agreement. We were designing posters about the Civil Rights movement. I was evaluating their work and making phone calls home.
You know – goofing off.
I must not have been the only one. Kids took a half-day and the district let us use in-service time to crunch our numbers.
Don’t get me wrong. We weren’t left to the wolves. Administrators were very helpful gathering data, researching exact dates for students entering the building and/or transferring schools. Just as required by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
But it was in the heat of all this numerological chaos that I saw something in the numbers no one else seemed to be looking for.
Many of my students are transients. An alarming number of my kids haven’t been in my class the entire year. They either transferred in from another school, transferred out, or moved into my class from another one.
A few had moved from my academic level course to the honors level Language Arts class. Many more had transferred in from special education courses.
In total, these students make up 44% of my roster.
“Isn’t that significant?” I wondered.
I poked my head in to another teacher’s room.
“How many transient students are on your roster?” I asked.
She told me. I went around from room-to-room asking the same question and comparing the answers.
A trend emerged.
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