Tweet, tweet. This post has almost nothing to do with Donald Trump. Let’s return to education for a moment. I encountered a data discrepancy in the last few days, a wild one. Social science numbers tend to be fuzzy, but these numbers make me think of Rapunzel’s hair. Fuzz cannot begin to cover what I have been reading.

Greatschools.org rates the local schools in North Chicago (a suburb found a little less than an hour north of the actual city of Chicago)  at abysmally low levels: 1 out of 10 for the local high school and 2 out of 10 for the local middle school. Greatschools does know that North Chicago Community High School has one language (Spanish), two versions of art and music, fifteen sports and no known clubs.

Greatschools gives Deerfield High School 6 out of 10, reason unknown. Greatschools has no idea how many clubs, world languages, sports, and arts and music classes can be found at Deerfield High School, so I thought the reason might be lack of data, but keep reading. I think they invented that number.

U.S. News and World Report has Deerfield High School rated seventh in Illinois for 2016, and 219th in national rankings. They don’t rate North Chicago Community High School at all. 

Schooldigger.com ranks North Chicago Community High School 586th of 635 public high schools in Illinois. It ranks Deerfield High School 260th out of 635 public high schools in Illinois, giving the school a community review of 3 out of 5 stars. NCCHS received zero stars.

I think I’ll throw in Glenbrook North High School, rated 26th in Illinois and 712th in the nation by U.S. News and World report. Glenbrook North’s SchoolDigger rank is 135th of 635 Illinois High Schools. Community review comes in at 3 out of 5 stars at Schooldigger, with an overall rating of 10 out of 10 at Greatschools.org.

What?!? Numbers, numbers, numbers. The question is this: Do these numbers even make sense? No, but they are out there and they are being used and even quoted.

Eduhonesty: Social science numbers bear only the loosest relationship to actual facts. Yet the rage in education right now is data acquisition. I have taken many 1/2 day sub jobs this year while colleagues attended data discussion meetings. This post is a reminder that, even when cloaked in big words and good intentions, sometimes data is just gobbledygook.