Last week’s back-and-forth over the LA Times value-added analysis illustrated the still delicate nature of value-added models, leading Harvard’s Tom Kane to conclude: “But we still don’t know yet which [model] was the right one and how far off from the truth the various estimates are.”
A small Australian company might have the answer. The February 11 issue of Science Magazine profiles Kaggle:
Kaggle’s core idea is to facilitate the analysis of data, whether it belongs to a scientist, a company, or an organization, by allowing outsiders to model it. To do that, the company organizes competitions in which anyone with a passion for data analysis can battle it out. The contests offered so far have ranged widely, encompassing everything from ranking international chess players to evaluating whether a person will respond to HIV treatments to forecasting if a researcher’s grant application will be approved. Despite often modest prizes—Žbontar won just $1000—the competitions have so far attracted more than 3000 statisticians, computer scientists, econometrists, mathematicians, and physicists from approximately 200 universities in 100 countries, Kaggle founder Anthony Goldbloom boasts….
Although only a handful of its competitions have finished, Kaggle has had promising results so far. Each contest has generated a better model for its data than what was used beforehand.
Bioinformaticist William Dampier of Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, organized the competition to predict, from their DNA, how a person with HIV might respond to a cocktail of antiretroviral drugs….Dampier considers Kaggle’s approach innovative, noting that it draws in data analyzers with various backgrounds and perspectives who are not shackled by a field’s dogma. Such outsiders, he suspects, are more likely to see something different and useful in the data set.
The prizes in Kaggle’s competitions have ranged from $150 to $25,000. Perhaps one of the many philanthropists–or teachers unions–interested in this issue should give Kaggle a call?
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You have not addressed the problem of firing teachers now based on the hopes that the models will turn out to be accurate. You still have not addressed Supply and Demand 101 which means that poor schools will lose their top talent to schools where it is easier to raise tests scores, regardless of whether someday over the rainbow the model is worked out. Neither have you addressed the increased incentives to do more counter-productive test prep and narrowing of the curriculum. We’ve known the social science on that educational malpractice for a long time, but it is still the predictable result of data-DRIVEN accountability. Let’s say we created the technology which allowed data-DRIVEN decison-making, how many decades would it take before flesh and blood humans learned to control it, and not be controlled by it. Rationality is just one small part of being a featherless biped. Its only a small part of education, and the social organizations known as schools,
Finally, you haven’t addressed “reformers” who WANT to use technology to destroy “the status quo.” Creating a better trigger lock will not stop people who want to use guns to destroy.
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