Democratic Data

                If you’ve been around a school lately, you know how ubiquitous conversations about data are.  We are told we should make ‘data driven’ decisions, although that usually means having some cherry picked and poorly understood data that supports an administrator’s idea.  Every school pumps out reams of data that no one really understands or, in the worst cases, even looks at.  I’m not trying to argue that all data is useless, although much of the data about education we currently produce clearly is.  What I want to argue is that there is a democratic and a non-democratic way to use data in trying to understand and improve education.

                The non-democratic way looks like what we’re doing now.  The data is produced using evaluation instruments that are not part of the daily work of the teachers or students.  If students start doing too well, the instruments change so that scores produce a distribution pattern that matches the intended outcome.  There is no real feedback loop, so whether the students do well or poorly there is no real way to use that to improve the school.  We’ve invested billions of dollars in a testing system that exactly reproduces the pattern of wealth and privilege that already exists in the country.  Since the ‘Nation at Risk’ came out in 1983, we have basically used data to justify the declining mobility that education used to produce.  We are fixated on the ‘failure’ of education because that failure excuses the increasingly unequal and undemocratic distribution of wealth in our country.  That inequality is not the fault of education, nor can education really solve that problem, but we use fraudulent educational data to soothe our conscience. 

                Undemocratic data is generated and controlled by elites who use to explain and justify their actions and privileges.  Democratic data is produced by people engaged in what Dewey called ‘inquiry.’  For Dewey, democratic citizenship produced a series of inquiries that brought people together to address and solve the problems they faced.  In education, that means using data not just to meet outcomes but to establish them.  A curriculum should be built from the inside out.  That is, a curriculum should reflect and honor the learning goals of a community in coordination with ‘educators’ who can frame and implement that curriculum for the specific students it’s designed to help.  Now, a curriculum is a list of things other ‘experts’ think students need to know, regardless of who they are, where they live or what motivates them to learn.  Democratically generated and published data would help that process develop and succeed.

                If we’re serious about democratic education, we should stop using data as a way of judging students in some social competition.  The competition is over before the students even enter kindergarten – the rich win.  Instead, we need ‘assessments’ that hold the students and the teachers accountable for generating and learning what they have mutually (parents and community members are included in this) decided on as a curriculum.  The purpose of democratic education is not to produce a few bright individuals who can become wealthy serving the wealthy, the purpose of a democratic education is to produce a civic basis for inquiry, a basis for addressing and solving the issues and problems that people are actually living through. 

                Our schools have become instruments of social inequality and division.  They use data to promote and expertise about learning that is fraudulent to its core.  Learning in a democracy is not something you do for someone else’s benefit.  Democratic learning is done for yourself and your community.  The notion that there is a curriculum or set of content that everyone does or should know is absurd.  Educational elites and the textbook and testing companies they work for have obscured the real purpose and function of education by spewing ‘data’ that distracts us from what learning is and should be.  A democratic education starts by cutting through these lies and obfuscations to ask simple and fundamental questions about learning and knowing.  Inquiry produces its own data.  It doesn’t buy it from Pearson.