In the end, we realized that the system was purely data hungry. Research had gone from being helpful, a tool…something to help our teaching…to an entity to be worshipped. More details, more schedules, more numbers, more charts…it was a sacrificial system…a blood lust with minimal return.
‘We can use the data to better inform our teaching practices’. Intoned. Gregorian mantra. Hypnotic.
Everyone scrambled to print, share, produce, file. Then the lull…then the stream of requests flowed again, bursting out from the gullet of downtown…ravenous…’new and improved’…’brand new’…all agog with novelty…as if somehow we had never traversed this path before. Then silence.
After awhile, after observing the continual data tsunami…we each grabbed a life raft and divided amongst ourselves. Those choosing to fight to change the system went one way. Those choosing to work outside and around the edges of the system…under the radar, through the side door, hand held heavy on the delete button; we scurried off in another direction.
But could those blasted test scores ever inch upward? Would the enraged data gods ever be satiated? This was and is the never ending hymn, sung out with gusto wherever we are forced to listen…
690 Saint Paul 