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Commentary: Transient kids becoming victims of ‘data abuse’

LA School Report | May 19, 2015



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gadflyonthewall

By Steven Singer | Gadflyonthewallblog

I was teaching my classes.

I was grading assignments.

I was procrastinating.

I should have been working on my class rosters.

My principals wanted me to calculate percentages for every student I had taught that year and submit them to the state.

How long had each student been in my grade book? What percentage of the year was each learner in my class before they took their standardized tests?

If I didn’t accurately calculate this in the next few days, the class list generated by the computer would become final, and my evaluation would be affected.

But it was in the heat of all this numerological chaos that I saw something in the numbers no one else seemed to be looking for.

 

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