"Failure Factories" and data visualization

The Tampa Bay Times wrote a series called "Failure Factories: How Pinellas County is failing its black students." In addition to being an important and compelling read about our schools that includes a lot of data, they have provided a prologue that tells the basic story via data visualization. You simply must check this out:

Link to prologue: http://www.tampabay.com/projects/2015/investigations/pinellas-failure-factories/chart-failing-black-students


Link to whole series: http://www.tampabay.com/projects/2015/investigations/pinellas-failure-factories/

What do you think? Does the visualization enhance the powerful nature of the story? Why or why not?

Faculty don't want to be evaluated via analytics

Interesting article that just came out about analytics and faculty at Rutgers University:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/05/11/rutgers-graduate-school-faculty-takes-stand-against-academic-analytics

The basic gist: The university contracted a data mining company to examine faculty productivity (publications, etc.) and benchmark against faculty elsewhere. The faculty do not want to be evaluated in this way, and have noted that there are errors in the system.

The university is downplaying a bit, especially when the question of cost is raised:

Addressing concerns about the cost of the four-year contract, the chancellor said it’s annually about the equivalent of hiring a midlevel analyst. But one person “could not possibly provide the information that we get from Academic Analytics, with data from hundreds of universities and thousands of faculty members.”

What do you think about this situation? Try to think about it from both perspectives.