Title: The New Stupid: Limitations of Data-Driven Education Reform
http://www.aei.org/include/pub_print.asp?pubID=29301
Summary: Frederick Hess completely diminishes the importance of data because the majority of educators are trying to take policy figures and use them in places where the circumstances are different—thus leading to a reoccurring failure among policy from state-to-state.
Topic: http://msaraceno.wordpress.com/question/
Category: This is academic research document.
What is it? This is a research document providing a look into how unreliable data in the education sector can be.
Publication Information: This document is published on the AEI for Public Policy Research website. Published on January 29, 2009.
Author: Frederick M. Hess, Resident Scholar and Director of Education Policy Studies.
Location: http://www.aei.org/include/pub_print.asp?pubID=29301
Accessed: March 1, 2009
Support: Frederick M. Hess uses his own article as a basis of information to what he is talking about in this document.
George W. Bohrnstedt and Brian M. Stecher. Used as a reference to the problems in California schools, who took standard data from another states schools who became successful through class size reduction, and how they failed because the data was not appropriate to those schools (based on data).
These sources just provide a guideline for how the author is putting information together. The author is working to provide the inadequate use of data and how using such data in schools could work but not under the current conditions it is being used. This research really lacks a lot back up and support but seems to fill in with expert opinion of standard practices.
Audience and Agenda: AEI is a private, nonpartisan, not-for-profit institution dedicated to research and education on issues of government, politics, economics, and social welfare. This organization is sponsored by tax-deductible contributions. The audience is people who are interested in research documents on a large list of topics. This specific document about education is probably read by a majority of educators or anyone involved in making policy reforms at any level. The research here is a compilation of data from many sources that work together to provide a large scope of peoples work.
Usefulness: The article is helpful in understanding how data is being misused and misinterpreted along spectrum of education programs and policies. The ideas represented seem to come from an educated perspective looking to describe how to better use data as a whole to make sounder decision making for the education arena. Although this is not a direct relationship to the topic I am addressing, the information is useful in understanding how information and data-decision making should be used—to its most effective potential. A blog used this as a source of information in reference to the problems of how the administration is addressing and moving in on policy reforms for education. Hess merely expands the horizon of how misleading information can be and how hard it is to use information in order to better direct a set of principles that don’t necessarily apply to every other school out there. Important information in here to be cataloged on how useful or misleading a data-research decision-making tool can be.
Filed under: Uncategorized
[...] http://msaraceno.wordpress.com/2009/03/09/source-form-23/ [...]