by Alain Jehlen in Schools and Youth
Posted on January 24, 2011 at 10:16 pm
Last Modified on February 1, 2011 at 10:25 pm
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I read in SomervillePatch that parents spoke out against classroom “data walls” at a recent school committee meeting, including one who said her daughter concluded from the chart in her classroom that she was stupid.
For those who haven’t followed this, these “data walls” are charts that show how individual Somerville students are progressing on a standardized tests called MAP for Measures of Academic Progress, which is given three times a year. Some charts show the child’s scores. Others show the “growth” score: how much the child’s score has gone up.
It’s all part of Somerville’s effort, so far mostly unsuccessful, to make “adequate yearly progress” as measured by the so-called “No Child Left Behind” law.
Even though Massachusetts kids are number one in the nation in test scores and very competitive internationally, more than half of Massachusetts schools are flunking NCLB. That’s because the law is crazy. I think we should stop trying to pass.
But I’m not writing about NCLB today. I’m writing about data walls.
SomervillePatch reported that teachers in grades 2 through 8 have been instructed to put up these charts. I’ve heard from some teachers that it’s not absolutely required, but they’ve been strongly urged to do it.
The children’s names are supposed to be coded so only the child knows where he or she is on the chart. But word gets around.
The principal and teachers of the Healey, where my granddaughters go to school, were kind enough to show me some of the data walls at their school.
They’re all different, all fascinating.
The teachers had worked hard to post the scores in a way that would minimize the pain to low-scoring kids.
One teacher put up a jungle scene with lots of monkeys, each one with a number representing a child. Above the scene, from left to right, were the levels of the MAP test—I don’t remember what the levels are called, but basically from poor to great. Each monkey’s position showed that child’s score.
Another teacher created an ocean scene with big turtles and other sea creatures, and also a lot of little fish. Each fish represented one child. She told each child which fish was his or hers, but the rest of the class isn’t supposed to know. This teacher thinks data walls are a good idea, at least for this class of students, although not necessarily for all classes. She didn’t want her children to feel they were competing with each other, so she told the children the chart showed them all working hard to improve their reading. One child, she said, responded, “It’s like in Finding Nemo, when the fish were trying to get out of the net: ‘Swim harder, swim harder!’”
Some other teachers at a range of grade levels said they really didn’t want to put up data walls but felt pressured to.
The day I saw these charts, my granddaughter’s third grade teacher had not posted any representation of individual scores, but she had a big thermometer chart on her wall showing the average score for the class and the class target. Near the thermometer was a poster she made with the class. She asked her children why they read, and the poster showed their answers:
We read because we love to read.
We read to learn.
We read to get information.
We read to calm ourselves.
A few weeks later, she added a different kind of data wall. This one does show individual progress, but not the kind that counts with bureaucrats in Washington. She asked each child what progress he or she had made since the start of the year and posted what they wrote, including:
at the beginning of the year I would not like to write but now I like to write.
In the beginning I bothered a lot of kids. Not anymore.
at the beginning of the year I diddent know how to spell huge words like humongous now I do after I think about it for a while.
I hope we’ll hear more information and opinions about these charts from parents, teachers, school committee members, and school officials.
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My hat is off to the teachers who try to keep learning worthwhile in the eyes of children, in the face of business-school folks who think that quantitation is paramount even at the expense of innovation. Sure, adults “understand” that there’s only First Place and Loser, but kids’ biggest advantage is that they don’t!
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I thought the purpose of the MAP tests was to show TEACHERS what each student already knew (in Sept.) and then how much each student had learned in January and the end of the year, rather than to motivate students to “learn harder.” This purpose makes sense, in that if everyone in the class has already mastered “subtraction facts up to 10,” for example, then the teacher will not cover that topic but will move on to the next level.
I think kids are already anxious enough about MCAS … it doesn’t help to add to their anxiety (or feelings of self-worth) by showing where they are in relation to their classmates, even if no one else but the teacher knows their standing. (And this can go either way, as a student at the “top” may worry about losing that position.)
Regardless of whether the kids are represented as monkeys in different levels of a tree or fish in different depths of the ocean, kids will see that the tests are basically a “competition” when the data is presented to them.
I think it’s much better to tell them, as my daughter’s teacher told her class, that both MCAS and MAPs are meant to show what they have learned and how well their teacher is doing at teaching them– not to show how they rank compared to others.
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I heard that at least one teacher at The Brown School staged a coup and threatened to quit if required to mount a Data Wall in the classroom.
I don’t think there are any Data Walls at the Brown.
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Correction! There is a chart outside the main office at the Brown School. (Sorry!) My sense is, though that the teachers (some of them) were enough opposed that they were granted some sort of waiver this year for the use of data walls in their classrooms. Also, someone suggested that they might have the backing of the union if they wanted to get the administration to back off on trying to insist on the data walls in classrooms.
If you don’t like data walls, that’d be a plus on the union’s side. Unions are currently being blamed for all of Education’s woes in this country. I think that’s unfair.
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Data walls will be the second item on the agenda at the Education Programs Subcommittee meeting on Tuesday, Feb. 8th at 7:00, 42 Cross Street.
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Here are some takeaways from tonight’s meeting regarding data walls:
Per Vince McKay: Teachers have control over how they display data…. The goal is to celebrate effort and achievement.
The consultant from Focus on Results, Janice Sonata, said that she’d seen individual student scores displayed in many of the 300 schools where their programs have been employed with no deleterious effect to any student or legal challenges.
Mark Neidergang (and several other school council members) expressed alarm at the notion of individual student scores being displayed. He insisted that this could be very discouraging and that it might be against privacy laws. In the end he said that he would not get in the way of any teacher’s decision to display scores, but it should be researched from a legal perspective if individual (and not aggregated) scores were used in displays. (This will be researched.)
Ms. Sonata said teachers must play an important role in framing the data for students. “We’re not prescriptive. Within the framework, we ask school teams to work it out.”
MN asked “How are our teachers being informed of their choices? We want to make sure our teachers have their hearts in this.”
Tony Pierantozzi insisted that the data is meant to be anonymous. If a student or parent expressed concern (or if their score was likely to be an outlier), they could opt out of having their data included. He also said that the more you aggregate the data, the less meaningful and encouraging it will be for students.
Vince McKay said that teachers will be required to use some kind of data displays as a reminder that academic growth is the constant goal.
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I’m told that “threatened to quit” was a misquote of what the Brown teacher actually said. Apologies! Still, I think it was in the spirit of what some teachers felt (and expressed to the principal) with regard to data walls. I was hoping that other teachers would feel empowered to stand up for what they really wanted on this. Anyway, the superintendant is putting out fires by taking down any charts with kids’ names. The battle continues because charts showing icons of kids (where each kid in the class knows who is who) are still probably going to be posted in hallways.
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Hats off to the loving resistance fighter who found a way to subversively show the data on her wall that really mattered. More teachers should follow her lead. This issue of data and accountability for it is really a plague. Even if the data displayed on these data walls represents class averages and not individual student scores it still is objectification of children which leads to exploitation of them by education profiteers. We need to start referring to this kind of data with much harsher words. It is child exploitation and teachers are being told that they will be held accountable for making sure it happens.
I wrote about this a couple of days ago. Perhaps others fighting this battle in their schools can take some ammunition from my post: http://carlanderson.blogspot.com/2011/02/student-data-and-child-exploitation.html
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I remember the “data wall” my fifth grade teacher had. One was related to behavior, another spelling, and the third, handwriting. It happened that behavior included organization. Organization, spelling, and handwriting were my greatest 5th grade challenges so on all her decorative data boards I was at the bottom. There were no data boards, or in fact any recognition of my strengths that year. It was such a sad year for me. I felt bad almost every day. I really worry about the use of public data boards of any kind.
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What about using student portfolios that include data, reflections, student work. . . instead?
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Just saw this article on Boston.com Stellar MCAS results lead to inquiry at school at the Wilbur Elementary School in Somerset.
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Hats off to this animation!:
http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/11253262/the-consultant-and-the-teacher-2-26-11
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