An Open Letter to Bill Gates: Why Not Measure This?

[Coyotl]

http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2013/02/an_open_letter_to_bill_gates_w.html

By Anthony Cody on February 8, 2013 7:41 PM

Yesterday I posted an essay that pointed out that Bill Gates apparently uses a different set of outcomes in choosing a school for his own children than the measurable ones his foundation advocates for the children of the less fortunate. I shared the thoughts of mathematician Cathy O'Neil, who points out

...the person who defines the model defines success, and by obscuring this power behind a data collection process and incrementally improved model results, it seems somehow sanitized and objective when it's not.

Don't be fooled by the mathematical imprimatur: behind every model and every data set is a political process that chose that data and built that model and defined success for that model.

As I pointed out yesterday, there are many outcomes that we value that are difficult to measure, leading to the first order of bias here, towards outcomes that are easily quantified. But there is a second order of bias at work here; deliberate choices that are made to define the parameters of the system within which we measure.

Bill Gates wrote ....