INFO 202 Fall 08 Blog

Imposing standardization upon a domain (Education): 

Our discussions about authority and vocabulary authoring remind me of the recent attempt by the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law of 2001 to standardize public educaton. For those that don’t know, the goals of NCLB were lofty:  to close the achievement gap between high performing and low performing school by implementing a system of accountability and high standards. This included giving annual academic assessments, having consequences for schools that fail to improve. NCLB was met with a great deal of hostility and resentment from many teachers. I had the chance to see observe this during my time teaching. And as 202 is reframing my worldview, I’m coming to see that some of the backlash against NCLB might be linked to the imposition of a new ontology upon a fragmented community of interest.

What happens when a new ontology is imposed upon a collection of thousands of communities of interest when each member of the community of interest is expected to be an expert in his or her own practice? 

NCLB could be seen as an ontology that defines the terms used to describe and represent the various processes surrounding public education. Few would argue with the intent of the law: NLCB seeks to reform public education and close the gap between high and low performing schools. In order to do this,  the federal government acts as an authority that imposes a certain redefinition of vocabulary and processes that carry with them a set of assumptions and values, not to mention  consequences. 

Fragmented Community of Interest (Teachers). 

For many teachers, NCLB came down to the five terms that defined the categories each of their students were placed into based upon their standardized tests scores: Well Below Basic, Below Basic, Basic, Proficient, Advanced. Students were tracked over school years, and schools were rewarded or punished based on the numbers students in each category (as well as numbers of different kinds of students in each category). At the time of its implementation, most teachers had already developed unique tracking and assessment systems over their many years of teaching. Suddenly they were asked to give up their own framework, and replace it with a new and unfamilair one. Soon, school communities were filled with angry cries directed toward NCLB: “They’re doing it all wrong. They’re making it worse”. They could have been saying, “They’re not speaking my language!”

I am suggesting that the national body of teachers is a fragmented community of interest. Rosenthal defines communities of interest (COI) as “a set of stakeholders who must exchange information in pursuit of their shared goals, interests, missions, or business processes and who therefore must have shared vocabulary for the information they exchange”(Rosenthal 47). As a small COI, it was difficult enough for the English department at my high school to define a shared vocabulary to exchange information. NCLB asked all teachers in all schools to use a system of standards, categorization and information exchange that they had no hand in developing. Oh, and teachers would be held accountable for it as well. 

The idea here is not that authoritative ontologies don’t work or can’t work. They are immensely useful. The point, I guess, is for us to be aware of the ontological inertia of a given domain. Any change in the structure of a system of categorization and accountability will be difficult to implement, and will probably be extremely painful to the existing users, especially if they have historically been free to create and implement their own systems. 

Rosenthal, Arnon (2004). From Semantic Integration to Semantics Management: Case Studies and a Way Forward.. SIGMOD Record.33, 44-50.