'Datafication' refers to the collective tools, technologies and processes used to transform an organization to a data-driven enterprise. This buzzword describes an organizational trend of defining the key to core business operations through a global reliance on data and its related infrastructure.
Data can be a vital component for supporting decision making within a school or school system. However the nature of the data and those collecting it can have profoundly different results than may be intended. Privatization of education has resulted in the use of data and data-driven systems (Power School, Teacher Logic/SIRS, School Zone and learning management systems like Moodle, Backboard, D2L) and the analytics they enable to shape educational practice beyond good instruction and assessment.
Various kinds of performance data are now collected and analyzed not just for national and sub-national policymaking, but also for the purposes of school inspection and accountability, as well as for the day-to-day operation of schools, including school administrators, planning and classroom teachers' pedagogical decisions. Because the data can be accessed by "controllers" and "administrators", many feel that the power to make decisions is shifting away from those nearest to the classroom to those who have access to data and the skills to interpret and leverage them. For example, in Denmark national test data has been put to a variety of managerial uses, not all of which support or are in the interests of teachers and learners[2]. It is concerning to think that standardized test scores are resulting in system wide decisions about effective instruction.
A specific example is the reaction of Ministers of Education and other system "actors" to the publication of the OECD Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) results every two years. The OECD ranks countries by their performance on "snapshot" measures of students on tests of science, mathematics and literacy (and this year the additional measure of "global competence"). The position on the global league table[3] can lead to bizarre public policy decisions, but positions the OECD as a new arbiter and new form of global governance[4] - as can be seen in their most recent statements about the future of education (OECD Education 2030 - The Future We Want).
In the global south, the worry about datafication is that algorithms developed in the global north will be "imported" and become a new form of colonialism. This is a major theme of the book Algorithms of Oppression, which looks at the way algorithms now in use in Africa discriminate against black women and the poor.
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