The Downside of Data-Driven Education

A dozen years ago, Richard Rothstein wrote an excellent paper called “Holding Accountability to Account,” showing how incentives can perversely affect and undermine the goal that are sought (it is free on the internet).

In 1990k Andrea A. Gabor wrote a book about W. Edwards Deming called The Man Who Discovered Quality, in which she explained Deming’s contempt for merit pay and bonuses, which cause employees to think about themselves and not about the organization and its larger purposes.

Muller wrote a recent article about “metric fixation” in which he reviewed the flaws of data-driven work

“When reward is tied to measured performance, metric fixation invites just this sort of gaming. But metric fixation also leads to a variety of more subtle unintended negative consequences. These include goal displacement, which comes in many varieties: when performance is judged by a few measures, and the stakes are high (keeping one’s job, getting a pay rise or raising the stock price at the time that stock options are vested), people focus on satisfying those measures – often at the expense of other, more important organizational goals that are not measured. The best-known example is ‘teaching to the test’, a widespread phenomenon that has distorted primary and secondary education in the United States since the adoption of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.”

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more on data driven education in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=data+driven+education