CURMUDGUCATION: PA: Big Bucks, Big Data and Big Kafka

CURMUDGUCATION: PA: Big Bucks, Big Data and Big Kafka:

PA: Big Bucks, Big Data and Big Kafka

For the "Maybe You Got Into the Wrong Line of Work" file, courtesy of the fine people at Opt Out Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania's Department of Education late in 2015 (back when our legislature's failure to pass a budget was just a disaster and not yet an appalling, embarrassing disaster) awarded a grant for theexpansion of the Pennsylvania Information Management System (PIMS).

The expansion is supposed to make the educator dashboard "more usable, enhance its functionality and increase dashboard adoption by stakeholders." In other words, the state has noticed that hardly anybody uses PIMS because it's a huge pain in the butt that yields little useful information but takes half of your planning period just to try to navigate.

The state would also like to "provide training to participating LEAs and have access to tools and professional support materials that assist them to better use data to support instructional decision-making." In other words, they would like us to use test results to decide what to do in our classroom.

Of course, part of the problem with using test data to drive instruction is that in PA, as in many states, the intellectual property interests of the test manufacturers are valued over the instructional interests of the schools, teachers, and students. Before we give the test, we all take sign an oath that we will not look at the test, and if we inadvertently see it, we will never ever reveal what we've seen or use it withCURMUDGUCATION: PA: Big Bucks, Big Data and Big Kafka: