Listing of events related to the Learning Observer
View the Project on GitHub ETS-Next-Gen/learning-observer-events
Family engagement improves student learning outcomes in both direct and indirect ways. Directly:
Indirectly, in a democracy, informed citizens are required to keep the system honest. This comes across both broadly (e.g. voting for school boards) and narrowly (e.g. individual parent activists diving deeply into specific issues, or organizing groups like PTAs/PTOs).
Critically, for any and all of this, parents need information. On paper, in the US, FERPA guarantees access to student records, PPRA to curricular materials, and mechanisms like FOIA, open meetings, and school councila to other types of information.
In practice, these laws are rarely followed, and indeed, are increasingly impossible to follow as information is locked up on corporate servers.
Consider, also, the level of information needed for different constituents. A tiny portion of families or researchers will want to do deep dives, auditing source code and logs (but those powerusers and thoughtleaders are be critical for keeping everyone else informed and act as a critical check-and-balance). A larger group will do a medium dive, and will e.g. want a high-level view of how data was used. A majority of families wabt simple, easy-to-comprehend information directly as needed to support their kids and their conversation with schools.
Take the position of an engaged parent activist. You have a child with a special need (e.g. disability, gifted, recovering from trauma, non-traditionally educated, etc). You are trying to advocate for your child, as well as other kids like your child:
How should we structure our data repository?
References: