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Elon Musk’s Team Decimates Education Department Arm That Tracks National School Performance.
(www.propublica.org)
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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Do you work in an industry that deals with the data they collect and report? If not, then your opinion is even less useful here than Musk's
I work with school data, I've worked with University, high school and primary school data. it is indeed all bullshit I'm large part because test scores are just noise and behaviours metrics are subjective and non standard.
I've never been able to develop a model with any predictive capacity whatsoever at all. Moreover, visualisations only ever show correlation and often do more harm than good as staff assume their actions are causing improvement when typically advantaged students simply take advantage of more activities etc.
The post above is certainly more insightful than Elon musk's opinion and this is coming from somebody who works with this type of data.
Again, I wouldn't suggest pulling it all apart. I would look deeply into the problem but this is really not the worst thing they've done.
Don't live in an political bubble. For years lefty teachers fought rankings, standardized testing, and the standardized testing industry. It doesn't help schools, or teachers. Don't be a knee-jerk reactionary, automatically saying that everything Musk does is wrong is counterproductive.
What was being done with the data was the problem, not the data gathering itself. All this means is that the data won't exist. The underlying problems still will. Not a single thing you've said justifies the action you're trying to justify.
Well it's probably both.
Insights from the data probably were not being actioned, but I would strongly suspect that the data they are collecting simply doesn't have a lot of predictive capacity.
However, I don't work with that specific data. I work with related data.
The Western world is far too concerned with test scores when they are just complete and utter bs.
I would say a test score is accurate plus or minus 40 % in terms of a student's understanding of a subject. They're just arbitrary.
'Data' is not neutral! The point of collecting data on teachers and schools was always about control, pushing down pay, cutting benefits and cutting funding. That's why these monitoring programs started, and continued to exist. A few naive people think that they might have some use in monitoring standards between schools, THEY DON'T. Pearson, Springer, and the other large education companies suck up much of the funding...not to the benefit of classrooms and students.
No, it's not. It is actually possible to use this data wisely. Source: every other country with better education than the US.
American skills issue.
No, you're pointing to the silver lining on a bad decision.
Gathering the the data isn't the problem. The data is supposed to lead to more funding where it's needed...but the same group killing the research is also very very very against funding education. It's only a useless endeavor because they make sure it's useless.
Keep the studies but address the problems it reveals.
I'm not sure keeping the studies is such a great thing either. A big chunk of it is standardized testing, and it would be really nice to have far less of that in schools. Granted, this will not address the problem of standardized testing.
I don't think data and studies should ever be buried. I do think we need to do a better job of exposing this data as nothing more than scattered tea leaves, with no validity to it. Just because someone spent lots of money collecting numbers, doesn't mean those numbers reflect anything real. And yes billions of dollars and hours of time can be spent collecting 'data', but the cost doesn't mean it's reflective of any truth.
From the guy using the term "lefty". I don't say "righty" when I want to be taken seriously.