A couple weeks ago, I talked about some changes likely coming to baseball. I’ve also been thinking ahead to the new school year. And a thought struck me that linked both very important aspects of my life. How could that be, you ask? Stay with me on this one.
Baseball is big into analytics. Every team has droves of people hired to analyze every batter and pitcher in the league and find patterns. When Miguel Sano comes up to bat for the Minnesota Twins, these wunderkinds have determined that there is very little chance he’ll hit it to the right side; you will see three infielders on the left side and even the first baseman almost halfway to second base. The statistics show that there is probably a less than 10% chance Sano will hit it to the right side.
I hate this. It slows up the game as fielders shift back and forth, depending on the batter and even the count. When we were growing up, if a lefty came up, we’d move around a little bit since he was more likely to hit it toward right, but that’s it. I started wondering just how effective these shifts really are. More on that in a bit.
Education has headed in this same direction. Maybe too many school administrators read Moneyball, the book that showed how the Oakland Athletics were using analytics to succeed with a limited budget, since the rise in the use of data has paralleled between education and MLB. Data is everywhere and is being touted as the (latest) answer to helping students succeed.
Teachers should surely look at numbers of how their students have done in the past and how those kids are progressing. Test scores are out there, though my regular readers know how much stock I put in those. There are other assessments that those of us who teach reading and math use in class and which can show the current status of a student. Most of us can keep track of this intuitively since you get to know how a student is doing through daily work.
Still, schools are doing the same as MLB in hiring people to analyze data and to teach the teachers how to do that on a, sometimes, weekly basis. If you can find me a school district that does not do this in some way, I’d be surprised. Like MLB, everyone starts swimming the same direction over time. When defensive shifts started in 2011, very few teams used them and not for every batter. Now every single team uses shifts for nearly every batter to some degree.
But the shifts aren’t working as much anymore. Statistics show that on ground balls put into play, batting averages are staying about the same over the past few years. While overall averages are dropping, that’s due in large part to more strikeouts. But professional hitters are going to make adjustments; more of them are hitting the ball in the air, which has also led to a record number of home runs recently. Plus, I’ve noticed that it’s harder to turn a double play when defenders are playing in unfamiliar territory.
It’s a matter of time before more batters learn how to bunt better to push the ball where the defense has vacated. And slowly, you’ll see the shifts revert for many of the batters. Will that happen with education’s love affair with data as well?
It will. Teachers have always looked at numbers; after all, we use them to assign grades. Your grade is a form of data. But now we’re getting to the point where we’re mirroring MLB in thinking that if we dive deep enough, we’ll find the solution to any problem. There’s one big problem with that: students are human beings. The instant we try to put them in boxes based solely on numbers, we lose a little bit of what makes education special as a profession.
Humans are quite adept at finding ways around things. We can also be unpredictable. Just like Miguel Sano might actually hit one on the ground toward where the second baseman used to be, a student might show a propensity to be either very good or to struggle in a certain area, but then do a 180-degree turn the other way just because of something in their life we can’t control.
Kids are kids, and as soon as you try to predict their behavior or ability, you’ll get yourself in trouble. It continues to amaze me that people who have been in education for decades keep falling for these new fads, when experienced teachers should know that, while there are sometimes some valuable new ways to look at things with each passing craze, we shouldn’t fall too deeply in love with any concept that happens along.
We have to take the human element into account and not just look at kids as being numbers. It’s one of the reasons I’ve always thought smaller schools are great for kids, because we tend not to do that.
Just like MLB teams will eventually look to save money from looking too closely at data, schools will have to do that too. This, too, shall pass. Meanwhile, a word of advice to young ballplayers: learn to bunt.
Word of the Week: This week’s word is pareidolia, which means the tendency to see a specific pattern in random stimulus, as in, “The teacher started to experience pareidolia after staring at too much data during inservice days, even though nothing was really there.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!