Read on Twitter
Now you know what terrible algorithms can do, consider that this is what’s been happening to people (including children) for multiple years now in parts of life that don’t concern you because you’re not exposed to them. Including: policing, child protection/removal, housing...
If you campaign against this, do me a favour and campaign against all the other unjust uses of predictive analytics and automated decision-making that DON’T directly affect your family. Don’t be “all for me, none for thee” about it.
Read and follow work by @DrDesmondPatton, @safiyanoble, @EmilyK100, @ruha9, @PopTechWorks, @schock, @mathbabedotorg and probably more people I forgot if you want to learn about this instead of just be outraged for a bit and go back to normal.
For non-UK scholars I tagged here, if you hadn’t heard the UK government used an algorithm to adjust the A-level (high school equivalent) grades for all kids’ practice exams because COVID stopped them taking ‘finals’. It graded down kids because they went to a ‘worse’ school.
Obvs the worst schools are also concentrated in areas with the highest poverty, which also tend to be places where many people of colour live, and so on and so on. Literally any schoolteacher, child, or parent in these communities could have told them how disastrous this would be
Those are now their final grades. If they appeal they’ve been threatened that this will mean it makes their peers’ grades go down if they get ranked higher than them after winning an appeal. It’s a shambles but people should know it’s par for the course if they read your books
IMO the reason for such outcry is that a lot of middle-class kids end up in a “bad” school bc they live in a city, or parents not rich enough for private schl, have been caught in the net. They’ve not just targeted the most marginalised this time, who this happens to ALL THE TIME
