362
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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I don't like Musk, but this is good. School performance tracking is voodoo math. Everyone knows that good schools are in good neighborhoods and bad schools are in bad neighborhoods. You don't need $900,000,000 in research, and the yearly publication of random lists. This just hurts individual teachers.
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
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.
'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 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.