Tiwtter Reply: ProPublica Education Opportunity Project

@Coolcatteacher shared a post this week on ProPublica's response to the Department of Education's Office on Civil Right new release of data- The Civil Rights Survey. The OCR survey compiles comprehensive data on school districts housing greater than 3,000 students. ProPublica took this data and compiled reports for each school in these districts with stats given in six distinct categories: Free/reduced lunch, % of teachers with less than two years experience, number of AP courses offered in each school, number of students which take at least one AP course, and number of students in an advanced math class. Provided as well are the state and district averages for these categories.

ProPublica took this large compilation of extensive data one step further by creating a app for Facebook that allows you to compare districts, schools, etc and then posts observations and data to your Facebook page.

CPS Stats

Overall, I think this is going to be an interesting and insightful tool for the comparison of schools both nationally, within districts and for Chicago specific communities. Hopefully, it begins to ignite some conversations outside of the professional education circle and fuel attitudes for change. This, however, is going to be entirely dependent on their marketing of the app and the resulting success of the app. As we all know, if it doesn't go viral, there is no point.

The only legitimate concern I have with the data that ProPublica's has pulled out for scrutiny, is the category of "Inexperienced Teachers." While I understand that inexperience is going to have an impact on schools; and undoubtedly, there is and issue with teachers being inadequately trained for the urban school setting; I fear the potential impact this data set could have on programs such as AUSL. While inexperience can be detrimental to a classroom setting, I have a difficult time with them giving the impression of all inexperienced teachers having a negative impact.