“When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.”

~ Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900), An Ideal husband, 1893

We wanted data, we got data. We post it on classroom and school walls. We stick it in computers and manila folders. My high school was using student numbers to post data until some students started using those numbers to hijack other students’ free lunches. Then we were asked to create a new set of secret codes. A plethora of acronyms are used to label data from state, national and for-profit standardized (mostly) tests.

Eduhonesty: Now that we have the data, I feel compelled to ask one question: Are we ahead? We are losing so much instructional time to create and assess this data that I would not be surprised to discovered that data-gathering efforts have resulted in declines in the very scores we are tracking. In fact, I’d put a month of the mortgage money on a bet that those scores have gone down as a direct result of time-loss from data-gathering efforts.