The Logistical Issues of Data

The DOE expects every school to assign teachers to start handling and processing data on their students.

What I mean by data is the intimate details of each and every student in the form of massive excel spreadsheets.

What we as teachers are tasked to do with this information, on TOP of the teaching duties of teaching 4-5 classes a day, is to assess the individual needs of every student on a regular basis.  What's their credit situation?  What's their Regents situation?  What's their attendance situation?  How does this affect their programming?  Who needs credit recovery?  Who needs summer school?  What's their progress to graduation?  What interventions would be needed to advance students?  Why are students failing?

Here's the downside of the data.  By the time we get the data in its raw excel form, it's usually several days old.  By the time we've identified the students and determined what the most pressing needs of these students are, we're weeks into the new term.

By the time interventions are established and the faculty are made aware of these interventions, it's pushing the point of no return in the trimester.  And honestly, you could have just gone around and asked each teacher which students are having the most trouble rather than going to the trouble of going blind looking at and reorganizing excel spreadsheets.

For some misguided reason, it appears that the responsibilities of a typical teacher have changed.  We're not only teaching and addressing classroom needs of over 80 students a day, we're working these excel spreadsheets for hours on end to cover our asses.

Where's the sense in that?  This data mining and data analysis work is a full-time position in itself.  We could hire somebody to do all of this work independently and give our teachers back several hours in collaborative and cooperative planning that we BADLY need.

It's not an administrative problem, but a shift in policy that has driven this data-obsessed overhaul in educating students.

Not to mention the flawed metrics used in the gathering of the information to begin with.  We're essentially making decisions about students based on unreliable systems of data provided by the DOE.  Our school along with many others have invested money from our school budget to buy into alternative data services since the DOE's data service are so terribly flawed.

And this is the data machine the DOE wants to use to measure a teacher's efficacy?

I'd like to see the study done on how the time spent data mining these spreadsheets affects the quality of instruction by draining time away from collaboration and cooperative planning.  But I won't hold my breath.  The DOE has proven time and again that they have no classroom-level common sense on the effects of their policies.