Data, democracy and school accountability: Controversy over school evaluation in the case of DeVasco High School

Abstract

Debate over the closure of DeVasco High School shows that data-driven accountability was a methodological and administrative processes that produced both transparency and opacity. Data, when applied to a system of accountability, produced new capabilities and powers, and as such were political. It created second-hand representations of important objects of analysis. Using these representations administrators spoke on behalf of the school, the student and the classroom, without having to rely on the first-person accounts of students, teachers or principals. They empowered one group-central city administrators-over another-teachers and principals. After analyzing the form these policies took, this article concludes that it is necessary to rethink the processes that create visibility and invisibility. Public data obscured the voices, experiences and collective traumas of students and faculty within the school. A narrow focus on activities within the schools rendered invisible the structural decisions made by the Department of Education in New York City-to favor small schools over large, comprehensive ones. In order to create understanding, and a sense of common purpose, those who are spoken for in simplified data must also be given the opportunity to debate the representations of their performance and quality.

Opening the black box of data-based school monitoring: Data infrastructures, flows and practices in state education agencies

“…Bellmann, 2015;Grek and Ozga, 2010), including research that has explicitly focused on the production and processing of international student assessments (Bloem, 2016;Gorur, 2014;Lewis, 2017;Villani, 2018). Nonetheless, the increasingly digital and automated formation, recoding, storage, manipulation and distribution of data, all of which have become integral features of education governance (Hartong, 2016(Hartong, , 2018aLandri, 2018;Sellar, 2015;Selwyn, 2014: 1;Williamson, 2017), have not yet been extensively examined (see West, 2017 for an important exception), representing a 'black box' for most education researchers and practitioners. In other words, as described by Selwyn (2014: 13-14), there remains a pressing need to better understand ' [.…”

International Perspectives on School Settings, Education Pollicy and Digital Strategies

“…(funded by the German Research Foundation/DFG 2017-2020 and situated at the Helmut-Schmidt-University in Hamburg, Germany) contributes to this important field of digital education governance studies by focusing on the ongoing transformation of school monitoring infrastructures, particularly in state-level school administration. 2 It is thus argued that monitoring infrastructures have always represented a central dimension of education governance, because they produce powerful representations of schools, teachers and students which administrators then use for real acting to guide and legitimize governmental decision-making (including high stakes decisions such as the opening and closure of schools and resource distribution) (West 2017). Over the past decade, school monitoring has become deeply affected by increasing digitalization and automatization, which has not only significantly expanded the amount of (available or aspirational) data, but also continuously accelerated (automated) data production and processing.…”

“…In recent years, however, a growing body of scholars has responded to this purely instrumental approach by calling for more critical data studies (for overview see Iliadis/Russo 2016) which, instead of understanding data as given, focus on their capabilities and power (e.g. West 2017). Such research explicitly raises questions "[…] about the [normative, added S.H] nature of data, how they are being produced, organized, analyzed and employed, and how best to make sense of them and the work they do" (Kitchin/Lauriault 2014: 1).…”

The power of relation-making: insights into the production and operation of digital school performance platforms in the US

“…350-352) reminds us, while the very idea of platforms as open, egalitarian, and neutral in the sense of providing 'visualized facts' (Kitchin et al, 2015, pp. 16-20) is used to legitimate arguments based on their content, platforms, in fact, define and restrict how users get to know, in the case of education, schools and, consequently, the forms and parameters of potential governmental intervention (see also Hartong & Förschler, 2019;West, 2017). Such 'algorithmic activation of relational impulses' (Bucher, 2018, p. 5) hints to the fact that each concept made actionable through platforms (in the case under study this includes high/low performing schools, school climate or students/schools at risk, to name just a few), while being presented as an objective numerical measure, is the result of multiple moments of selection, ordering and weighting.…”

“…With this paper, I seek to contribute to this need by disentangling at least some key dimensions of the enactment and materiality of digital school performance platforms (SPP) commonly used by US state education agencies as part of their State Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) to monitor education. In doing so, I complement others who have studied SPP such as MySchool in Australia (Gorur, 2013;Souto-Otero & Beneito-Montagut, 2016), Scuola in Chiaro in Italy (Landri, 2018), or the National Pupil Database as well as Ofsted data dashboards in the UK (Williamson, 2015), all of whom provided important insights into such platforms' materiality and operationality, particularly regarding their power to (re)shape what is seen and valued by schools as well as how schools are represented and related in terms of 'mediated transparency' (Landri, 2018, p. 13; see also West, 2017). This seems all the more important given that the evaluative quality of such platforms (Robertson, 2019) increasingly guides not only parental school choice but also state administration in holding schools accountable to particular data targets (including consequences such as taking over underperforming schools, distributing resources among schools, etc.…”