Education Data = Fool’s Gold

Even education insiders are beginning to acknowledge that the data mining the federal government is now engaged in under Common Core produces little in the way of education achievement. “The evidence that the collection of data has led to improvements in education, we really don’t have it,” Philip Piely, author of Assessing the Educational Data Movement, said recently at an Educational Policy Forum.

Piely, a faculty affiliate at Johns Hopkins, spoke at a forum sponsored by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) on March 14, 2014. “The number of times that data has been collected where it is not to be used for a given purpose but then is used for that purpose” should be disconcerting, Piely observed at the AERA forum.

One of the attendees at the AERA forum, Fred Winter, a consultant who recently left the U. S. Department of Education noted that at that agency, “there is a growing emphasis on database grant-making.”

“This is a field that has been emerging after No Child Left Behind,” Piely observed. “We’re not going back.”  Meanwhile, he noted that the Obama Administration is spending $650 million developing test to go with its Common Core education reforms and the Department of Education has established “chief privacy offices.”  All of which makes one wonder, just what is all this data being collected for?