Saturday, August 30, 2014

Your DOE-nut Of the Week! 'Data Fell in Love With A Hustler'

Happy last-saturday-of-summer-vacation fine people!!!! If you find yourself a bit depressed about being back at work next week while on your way in, just remember one thing: Your job is the best and most important in the world!! 


And if that doesn't help, just take another swig of coffee...



As you know, each week (or maybe once a decade) I give a shout-out to what I think is the craziest, zaniest thing to occur to the education world in NYC and beyond.

Sure, It's education and the whole chaotic, rage infested discussion is pretty crazy. But only a few of these insanely silly stories can rise to the level of actually being 'nuts.

-Still fewer rise the remarkable level of #DOE-nut


-But only a tiny amount actually earn the coveted title of DOE-nut Of the Week. For the sake of all that is noble and sane in this world, that award winning DOE-nut is must get a shout-out, don't you think?


For this week's DOE-nut Of the Week, I'd like to play a little game. You see, the actual award goes to the New York State Education Department (as you may have heard, they released the teacher rating data on Thursday -from previous year!!! The actual data (which does not include NYC, as it didn't have APPR in 2012-2013) can be found here), but I'm not sending any prizes up to Albany. No no no. The actual prize (which is a gift card to Dunkin' Donuts via email) will go to the first five people who can examine the image below and tell me, in detail, what is so crazy, zany and insanely silly about state complied final teacher ratings.

If you need a hint, I'm very sorry, but you're not gonna get it. I, however, will say this: When the notion of using data to make decisions (and Big Data is used all over our society to make all sorts of decisions) and that data is operated by oodles and oodles of politicians who each have their own agenda, then you are bound to get some data that gets used and confused. That's what you're looking at below. It's data! But it's profoundly confusing data -data that no longer serves a purpose worth serving any students. Check it out and see if you can guess.



The first person to drop a comment with the correct answer will indeed get a $5 gift card to D&D on me. 

Happy guessing.








2 comments:

  1. Only 63,000 teachers rated? That seems a bit small for a whole state

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yeah. No.
      The rule is supposed to be that if your scored ineffective on your state growth scores, then your overall score is ineffective. If the rule is followed, then these 5% of these 63,625 professionals, grade 3-8, ELA & Math, would have ineffective because their state growth is ineffective.

      No worries. I'll try a much easier question next time ')

      Delete