scholarly journals Productive myopia: Racialized organizations and edtech

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 205395172110504
Author(s):  
Roderic Crooks
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Digital Data ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Data Intensive ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Goods And Services ◽  
Data Team ◽  
Racial Projects ◽  
Charter Management Organization

This paper reports on a two-year, field-based study set in a charter management organization (CMO-LAX), a not-for-profit educational organization that operates 18 public schools exclusively in the Black and Latinx communities of South and East Los Angeles. At CMO-LAX, the nine-member Data Team pursues the organization's avowed mission of making public schools data-driven, primarily through the aggregation, analysis, and visualization of digital data derived from quotidian educational activities. This paper draws on the theory of racialized organizations to characterize aspects of data-driven management of public education as practiced by CMO-LAX. I explore two examples of how CMO-LAX shapes data to support racial projects: the reconstruction of the figure of chronic truants and the incorporation of this figure in a calculative regime of student accomplishment. Organizational uses of data support a strategy I call productive myopia, a way of pursuing racial projects via seemingly independent, objective quantifications. This strategy allows the organization to claim to mitigate racial projects and, simultaneously, to accommodate them. This paper concludes by arguing for approaches to research and practice that center racial projects, particularly when data-intensive tools and platforms are incorporated into the provision of public goods and services such as education.

Unification and Its Discontents

2016 ◽  
Vol 93 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-16
Author(s):  
Brian Kovalesky
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
School District ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
School Districts ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Los Angeles County ◽  
The State ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
City Schools

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, during the height of protests and actions by civil rights activists around de facto school segregation in the Los Angeles area, the residents of a group of small cities just southeast of the City of Los Angeles fought to break away from the Los Angeles City Schools and create a new, independent school district—one that would help preserve racially segregated schools in the area. The “Four Cities” coalition was comprised of residents of the majority white, working-class cities of Vernon, Maywood, Huntington Park, and Bell—all of which had joined the Los Angeles City Schools in the 1920s and 1930s rather than continue to operate local districts. The coalition later expanded to include residents of the cities of South Gate, Cudahy, and some unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County, although Vernon was eventually excluded. The Four Cities coalition petitioned for the new district in response to a planned merger of the Los Angeles City Schools—until this time comprised of separate elementary and high school districts—into the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). The coalition's strategy was to utilize a provision of the district unification process that allowed citizens to petition for reconfiguration or redrawing of boundaries. Unification was encouraged by the California State Board of Education and legislature in order to combine the administrative functions of separate primary and secondary school districts—the dominant model up to this time—to better serve the state's rapidly growing population of children and their educational needs, and was being deliberated in communities across the state and throughout Los Angeles County. The debates at the time over school district unification in the Greater Los Angeles area, like the one over the Four Cities proposal, were inextricably tied to larger issues, such as taxation, control of community institutions, the size and role of state and county government, and racial segregation. At the same time that civil rights activists in the area and the state government alike were articulating a vision of public schools that was more inclusive and demanded larger-scale, consolidated administration, the unification process reveals an often-overlooked grassroots activism among residents of the majority white, working-class cities surrounding Los Angeles that put forward a vision of exclusionary, smaller-scale school districts based on notions of local control and what they termed “community identity.”

Community-based? Asian American Students, Parents, and Teachers in the Shifting Chinatowns of New York and Los Angeles

2012 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benji Chang ◽  
Juhyung Lee
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Asian American Students ◽  
Education Experience ◽  
American Students ◽  
Community Organizers ◽  
Holistic Vision

This article examines the experiences of children, parents, and teachers in the New York and Los Angeles Chinatown public schools, as observed by two classroom educators, one based in each city. The authors document trends among the transnational East and Southeast Asian families that comprise the majority in the local Chinatown schools and discuss some of the key intersections of communities and identities within those schools, as well as the pedagogies that try to build upon these intersections in the name of student empowerment and a more holistic vision of student achievement. Ultimately, this article seeks to bring forth the unique perspectives of Chinatown community members and explore how students, families, teachers, school staff and administrators, and community organizers can collaborate to actualize a more transformative public education experience.

The Role of the Business Sector in Global Health Politics

2018 ◽  
pp. 385-408
Author(s):  
Kelley Lee ◽  
Julia Smith
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Global Health ◽  
Business Sector ◽  
Policy Debate ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Health Politics ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Goods And Services ◽  
Private Interests ◽  
Health Related

The influence of for-profit businesses in collective action across countries to protect and promote population health dates from the first International Sanitary Conferences of the nineteenth century. The restructuring of the world economy since the late twentieth century and the growth of large transnational corporations have led the business sector to become a key feature of global health politics. The business sector has subsequently moved from being a commercial producer of health-related goods and services, contractor, and charitable donor, to being a major shaper of, and even participant in, global health policymaking bodies. This chapter discusses three sites where this has occurred: collective action to regulate health-harming industries, activities to provide for public interest needs, and participation in decision-making within global health institutions. These changing forms of engagement by the business sector have elicited scholarly and policy debate regarding the appropriate relationship between public and private interests in global health.

scholarly journals Quantifying the Impact of a Tsunami on Data-Driven Earthquake Relief Zone Planning in Los Angeles County via Multivariate Spatial Optimization

Geosciences ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yueqi Gu ◽  
Orhun Aydin ◽  
Jacqueline Sosa
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Safety Data ◽  
Spatial Optimization ◽  
Optimal Number ◽  
Multidisciplinary Optimization ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Fault System ◽  
Design Data ◽  
The Impact

Post-earthquake relief zone planning is a multidisciplinary optimization problem, which required delineating zones that seek to minimize the loss of life and property. In this study, we offer an end-to-end workflow to define relief zone suitability and equitable relief service zones for Los Angeles (LA) County. In particular, we address the impact of a tsunami in the study due to LA’s high spatial complexities in terms of clustering of population along the coastline, and a complicated inland fault system. We design data-driven earthquake relief zones with a wide variety of inputs, including geological features, population, and public safety. Data-driven zones were generated by solving the p-median problem with the Teitz–Bart algorithm without any a priori knowledge of optimal relief zones. We define the metrics to determine the optimal number of relief zones as a part of the proposed workflow. Finally, we measure the impacts of a tsunami in LA County by comparing data-driven relief zone maps for a case with a tsunami and a case without a tsunami. Our results show that the impact of the tsunami on the relief zones can extend up to 160 km inland from the study area.

Attending to data: Exploring the use of attendance data within the datafied school

2021 ◽  
pp. 003452372098420
Author(s):  
Neil Selwyn ◽  
Luci Pangrazio ◽  
Bronwyn Cumbo
Keyword(s):  
Secondary Schools ◽  
Empirical Data ◽  
Qualitative Studies ◽  
Digital Data ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
School Staff ◽  
Digital Form ◽  
Student Attendance ◽  
Contemporary Schooling

Contemporary schooling is seen to be altering significantly in light of a combined ‘digitisation’ and ‘datafication’ of key processes. This paper examines the nature and conditions of the datafied school by exploring how a relatively prosaic and longstanding school metric (student attendance data) is being produced and used in digital form. Drawing on empirical data taken from in-depth qualitative studies in three contrasting Australian secondary schools, the paper considers ‘anticipatory’, ‘analytical’ and ‘administrative’ aspects of how digitally-mediated attendance data is produced, used and imagined by school staff. Our findings foreground a number of constraints, compromises and inconsistencies that are usually glossed-over in enthusiasms for ‘data-driven’ education. It is argued that these findings highlight the messy realities of schools’ current relationships with digital data, and the broader logics of school datafications.

Beyond Individualism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Prainsack
Keyword(s):  
Personalized Medicine ◽  
Medical Practice ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Social Solidarity ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Not For Profit ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Personal Interests

Although dichotomies such as online versus offline and for-profit versus not-for-profit, have been challenged by data-driven personalized medicine, a dichotomy that is still intact is that between self-interest and care for others. It is rooted in the dominant Western understanding of persons as (ideally) autonomous, independent, and rational individuals. This chapter argues that such an understanding of persons creates tangible problems in medical practice and research, and it leads to a vision of personalization that could be seen as fostering ruthless individualism. The chapter proposes ways to overcome this unproductive conflation of personhood with individualism in medicine. It explores how personalized medicine could help to bring personal interests and social solidarity closer together.

Assessing Blood Administering Practices

1999 ◽  
Vol 123 (7) ◽  
pp. 595-598 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ira A. Shulman ◽  
Sunita Saxena ◽  
Lois Ramer
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Los Angeles County ◽  
Medical Center ◽  
Health Care Financing ◽  
Vital Signs ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Blood Component ◽  
University Of Southern California ◽  
Health Care Financing Administration

Abstract The risk that a red blood cell unit will be associated with an ABO-incompatible transfusion is currently slightly greater than the aggregate risk of acquiring human immunodeficiency virus, human T-cell lymphotropic virus, hepatitis B virus, or hepatitis C virus by transfusion. Since the most common cause for ABO-incompatible transfusion is the failure of transfusionists to properly identify a patient or a blood component before a transfusion, transfusion services are encouraged to evaluate and monitor the processes of dispensing and administering blood. In addition, a proposal of the Health Care Financing Administration of the Department of Health and Human Services would require hospitals to use a data-driven quality assessment and performance improvement program that evaluates the dispensing and administering of blood and that ensures that each blood product and each intended recipient is positively identified before transfusion. The Los Angeles County+University of Southern California Medical Center assesses the blood dispensing and administering process as proposed by the Health Care Financing Administration. During the fourth quarter of 1997, 85 blood transfusions were assessed for compliance with the Los Angeles County+University of Southern California Medical Center policies and procedures: 55 transfusion episodes had no variance from institutional protocol and 30 had one or more variances. Of the transfusions with at least one variance, 16 had one or more variances involving the identification of the patient, the component, or the paperwork. The remaining 14 transfusions had one or more variances involving other criteria (nonidentification items). The most frequent variance was the failure to document vital signs during the first 15 minutes after a transfusion was started or after 50 mL of a component had been transfused. No variances in patient or blood component identification were noted in nursing units whose staff routinely performed self-assessment of blood administering practices. Based on these findings, a corrective action plan was implemented. Follow-up assessments (n = 63) were conducted after 3 months (during the second quarter of 1998). The compliance with the pretransfusion identification protocol improved from 81% to 95%. The most common reason for noncompliance continued to be a lack of checking vital signs. This report demonstrates the value of using a data-driven program that assesses blood administering practices.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document