What lessons should the Council learn from two of their failed Task forces?
The City Council likes to create task forces to investigate important policy issues and propose changes, but then leaves them unattended and under the entire control of the Mayor, whose office screws them up.
One recent example is Automated Decision System Task force, created by Council Local Law 49 , that was supposed to investigate city agencies’ use of automated decision-making and deliver a report with recommendations.
The law was widely celebrated and promoted by the Mayor’s office as the first attempt by any municipality to embark on a systematic analysis of the controversial trend of using non-transparent algorithms to make crucial governmental decisions in criminal justice, education and elsewhere.
In NYC, algorithms have been used by many cities agencies, and are used by the DOE for school enrollment and admission decisions, as well as well as teacher evaluation and even flagging certain students as potential risk for dropping out through "early warning systems". The use of such algorithms have been criticized as both "black boxes" that are difficult to understand and may further reify various kinds of bias and injustice in a way that is difficult to discern and counteract. According to a hearing transcript, Jimmy Vacca, the bill's prime sponsor, said:
"I strongly believe the public has a right to know when decisions are made using algorithms, and they have a right to know how these decisions are made.When the Department of Education uses an algorithm to assign children to different high schools, and a child is assigned to their sixth choice, they and their family have a right to know how that algorithm determined that their child would get their sixth choice. They should not merely be told that they were assigned to a school because an algorithm made the most efficient allocation of school seats. What is considered to be most efficient? Who decided this? A mathematician, a computer programmer? "
Later, in written response to questions from Education Week, Vacca said he hoped his legislation would also bring transparency and improvements to the district's "inaccurate or erratic teacher evaluations," which he said "can occasionally spit out pretty different scores for the same teachers from year to year, or low scores for good teachers."
The AI institute provided a list of algorithms used in NYC agencies and elsewhere, some of which had egregiously failed. See Gary Rubinstein and Cathy O'Neil, for example, of the travesty that resulted in NYC's absurd teacher evaluation system – and yet the resulting teacher ratings were printed in all the daily papers at Joel Klein’s encouragement.
Although many of the members appointed to this Task force were independent experts in the field, (though none with a special interest in education) , the Mayor's office kept a tight hold on the proceedings, which by and large were not open to the public, and no minutes were kept. The co-chair, Jeff Thamkittikasem, director of the Mayor’s Office of CONTINUE READING: NYC Public School Parents: What lessons should the Council learn from two of their failed Task forces?
