When my school put in new copy machines 18 months ago, everyone was assigned an account number. As a result, the administration knows exactly how many copies each teacher has made. Last week they sent the faculty an email about the quantity of paper we use each month. They didn’t release the names of individual teachers who are Heavy Users, but they did mention that the Top User had made more than 101,000 copies in 18 months. An assistant principal went around to the Top 20 Users to make sure they knew their status.
The initial response by the faculty was to guess at who the Number 1 User is. Then everyone wanted to know where they stood in comparison to others. In the third wave, we started to reflect on what this data means.
A colleague and I discussed it Friday afternoon. She was one of the Top 20, and she was unhappy to have been visited by the assistant principal. “I covered a class for Mr. M—–,” she said, “and I found out that my total student count is 45% higher than his. Of course I’m going to use more paper.”
Her comment points to the danger of releasing data without a context. All of the teachers who asked were given their total usage, but if we’re not in the Top 20, we don’t know where we stand. The assistant principal would only say vaguely, “You’re about in the middle” or “That’s on the low side.” We don’t know how many copies per student our total represents. We don’t know what a typical number of copies would be, compared to other teachers with our same student load, compared to other teachers in our department, compared to other schools in our region, demographic, or state.
Much of what we do in education, business, and politics purports to be data-driven. Pie charts, bar graphs, and scatter charts are the new “‘rithmetic” expected of students. Those numbers, however, need to be subjected to the same healthy skepticism we give to the things we read online.
Because we have computers and can generate data effortlessly, we do. We should remember, though, that without a rich context, the numbers might not be telling us anything valuable at all.