How Data Is Changing The Education System
The United States education system, despite the country’s massive wealth, has never really fulfilled its potential, lagging behind many other developed nations. Indeed, research on basic education levels throughout the world by the Social Progress Imperative ranked the USA 14th in the world in 2015/2016, with east Asian countries dominating the leaderboard – South Korea tops the rankings, followed by Japan in second place.
The reasons for this are complex. Lack of funding, poor teaching, poor teacher training, even women abandoning the teaching profession because of better equality in corporate opportunities, have all been blamed for the problem. One oft-cited reason is the failure to keep pace with the needs of our hyper-connected society and advancing technology, although this is increasingly being rectified as schools embrace analytics and machine learning, bringing powerful algorithms into classrooms to help refine teaching methods.
We have always used data in the classroom to a degree. In Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times, school board Superintendent Mr Gradgrind’s insisted that ‘Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them.’ This is an outlook that has largely stood true for measuring performance since the industrial revolution, with various metrics, grades, and averages in the classroom providing students with an idea of what ‘good’ is and a route to achieving it. On a macro level, districts analyze large data sets for patterns around students’ academic performance and attendance to show which schools and teachers are failing.
What has been recognized since Gradgrind prowled the corridors is that all pupils learn differently. They have different needs, come from different backgrounds, and have different interests.
