“Working in the data mine, goin’ down, down, down
Workin’ in the data mine, oop! About to slip down.”
Video Courtesy of Lee Dorsey
Parody courtesy of me
Parody courtesy of me
CHORUS
We’re workin’ in the data mine,
Goin’ down down down,
Workin’ for the data mine,
Oop! about to slip down.
Workin’ in the data mine
Goin’ down down down
Workin’ in the data mine
Oop! About to slip down
Oop! About to slip down
Six o’clock in the morning
Already up and gone
Lord, I’m so tired
How long can this go on? CHORUS
Cause I make a little money
Givin' tests by the
ton
When Saturday rolls
around
I'm too tired for havin' fun. CHORUS
For the first 35 years of teaching, I spent a good portion
of my time and money in August, deciding on color schemes for my classroom,
first month bulletin boards, and educational/motivational posters to put on the
walls. After all, kids are going to spend 6.5 hours a day x 5 days a week in
the room and I wanted them to feel welcomed and inspired.
Through the years, my classroom walls have been painted
hospital green, washed-out yellow or
the palest of blue. All around the room above the blackboards was a foot-high
space waiting for a splash of color and trim, waiting to highlight important
vocabulary words in each subject and a number line, 180 numbers long. The
blackboards on each wall were sandwiched between two bulletin boards that held
good work, daily reminders, and calendars, schedules and rules.
Inside the room there were posters with inspirational
quotes, exhortations to do your best, suggestions on how to get along with
classmates, reminders about procedures for solving math problems, writing a
narrative, informational or opinion essay, what-to-do-when-you-are-finished, creative
art projects, book reviews, and any manner of
poster that would show off the intelligence, creativity and improvement
of the students.
Outside the classroom door was a huge bulletin board that,
in September, highlighted and welcomed individual members of your class. The
rest of the year, it held, art work, poems, seasonal word games, data from
experiments we performed, anything to celebrate what great things were
happening in my class.
Everyone knew our data from Project Groundhog, as it was
displayed along with pictures of our international team members and a map
marking where our Project Groundhog team schools were located. The last
bulletin board had 5 states and 1 Canadian province colored in and the cities
were marked with a push-pin. The class across the hall was the 7th
and 8th grade math class, who always posted a mathematical riddle or
tough problem outside, encouraging kids of all ages to solve it. The 6th
grade rooms posted beautiful poetry on their bulletin board, the science
teacher always had a topical board and the social studies teacher always posted
the 7th and 8th grade students’ projects in the hall,
overflowing her bulletin board. When you walked through the halls, you could
always tell what was going on in classrooms by the hallway boards. It
was very welcoming.
About 2008, the school district began insisting on certain
data to be displayed in the main hallway outside the office. Previous to this
time, the hallway was adorned with paintings by Winslow Homer, trophies and ribbons
from our championship chess team, and banners from the years our school made
AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress). The art teacher, when we had one, used this
hallway to highlight great work of our budding Picasso’s and Monet’s. The year
2008 brought increased emphasis on the data the school district required us to
post publicly. Right outside the office, prominently displayed, were the results
from the last standardized test, the PSSA. They were disaggregated to include
multi-year results in reading, math and writing from each grade and room, along
with attendance data. The two bulletin boards outside the office were occupied
by attendance charts and the one thing we insisted be displayed, the “Good
Citizens” list and photos from the lower grades. Inside the office, the test
results had to be displayed and available in the form of a data binder that the
principal kept in her office.
Gradually, the data creep began to affect the teachers when
we were required to keep drawers of files for work collected from each student
that would indicate progress or lack of.
We were also required to keep copies of essays written, along with the
drafts and comments about writing conferences. When the powers-that-be came
through the school for the infamous Walk-Through that year, they were not happy
with the vocabulary walls and visual word walls for math, even though they
required us to have them several years prior. We were now required to include
the standards we were going to address for the week as well as the daily objectives
for each subject, written in kid-language. So we concentrated on the standards
and objectives, even though this consumed at least one of the available
bulletin boards in the room.
The following years requirements ate into most of the
creative work displayed in the class. Instead we hung up anonymous lists of
reading levels, rubrics for every project assigned, and we went back to word
walls. Every 6 weeks the kids took benchmark exams in reading, math and science
and we had to examine the data, write a plan to improve and keep these in our
bright red data books, which now seemed to be more important than lesson plans.
During this time, the demands from the district began to clash with what we
knew was good teaching. Despite that, we were forced to discontinue reading
novels in reading, and instead were told to issue a short excerpt and questions
in order to prepare for the PSSA tests. Along with these short excerpts were
open-ended math problems graded according to rubrics, and writing samples with
rubrics.
We were then asked to post samples of successful papers in
the hall with comments attached to them indicating what made the paper a 3 or a
4 on the rubric. While kids were always happy to see their papers in the
hallway, it was quite evident whose papers never made it into the hallway. Many
of those kids, instead of being motivated to do better, just immediately gave up
trying to get a proficient grade. We were expected to fill in posters on how
many pages or chapters or books our kids read. That was most disturbing in the
younger grades, as it became perfectly obvious which kids’ parents read with
them at home and which parents didn’t. I was always embarrassed for the poor
first grader or kindergartener who only had one or two stickers, while everyone
else had 20.
But the most horrible thing for me was when the district
said they didn’t want to see motivational posters in the room, only the ones
related to testing and data. Every room was supposed to have the same things on
their walls. Every hallway was supposed to have the same thing outside each
class. Everything became standardized, along with the tests the students took.
But now, many school districts require you to post
individualized data from tests you give, so students and parents will know
where the students stand and supposedly to be motivated to make them do better. Or
motivated to beat their kid for being last, or motivated to berate their
learning disabled child into doing better, or perhaps to
question the teacher’s ability, fairness, or prejudices in assigning grades.
This was supposed to make the kids desire to do better. It does no such thing.
Neither the students nor their teacher can win this battle. And it’s just
getting worse. The teachers and principals have to take back their schools form
the standardized movement and be able to do what will raise the self-esteem and
perseverance of the children. It is different with each child – that part is
not standardized either.
Now, with the use of the Common Core computerized tests
coming soon to a school district near you, all kinds of data will be available
to all kinds of people. There is a real concern about what personal data will
be mined from these test results along with the test-related public information
the school reformers are hungry for.
Despite the increased use of data on the school walls,
standardized test scores continue to stagnate or go lower. The collection of data is not the solution,
but how it is used is part of the problem.
We’re workin’ for the data mine,
Goin’ down down down,
Workin’ for the data mine,
Ooop! about to slip down...
For a view from someone who embraces data walls (not me),
click here:
No comments:
Post a Comment