Tuition at the Chapman Colleges is north of $50,000 a year. Expensive for a third rate education, taught by brain dead professors. Harsh words, yes. But, Education Professor Noah golden believes that using software in the classroom is proof of racism. Is he smoking funny cigarettes? Did he take a dumb pill or is he so whacked out that reality was never in his wheelhouse?
“A Chapman University professor recently argued that computer software helps perpetuate “systems of privilege and oppression” against minority children.
Noah Golden, an education professor, published an article last Friday on the role of technology in education, lamenting that computer software is often used in the “testing and classification” of minority students.
“Software plays a central role in maintaining separate and unequal educational opportunities.”
Wonder is anyone told him that LAUSD had 45% of its June graduates with a “D” average—is that racist as well? I contend it is—giving a diploma to a functional illiterate is racist—but then, what else would you expect of a school district controlled by unions—decent, honest, successful education?
Computer software perpetuates ‘systemic racism,’ prof finds
Toni Airaksinen, Campus Reform, 10/23/17
- According to Education Professor Noah Golden, software can be harmful because it can reduce students and schools to numbers that can be used to justify policy positions.
- Golden previously wrote in 2014 that data can be used to discount students’ “identities” and “cultural practices.”
A Chapman University professor recently argued that computer software helps perpetuate “systems of privilege and oppression” against minority children.
Noah Golden, an education professor, published an article last Friday on the role of technology in education, lamenting that computer software is often used in the “testing and classification” of minority students.
“Software plays a central role in maintaining separate and unequal educational opportunities.”
“Software plays a central role in maintaining separate and unequal educational opportunities for marginalized youth,” Golden said, explaining that this is especially concerning in public schools.
Software, used during an era of high stakes testing, “converts lived realities, learner strengths, and communal needs into a number, cluster grouping, or other data points,” which can “produce or reproduce systems of privilege and oppression.”
This software can be particularly harmful because it can reduce students and schools to numbers that could be used to justify policy decisions, such as replacing a failing school or to putting smart students in higher level classes, he notes.
When schools do use this software, “educational access and deservingness is outsourced to algorithms” that serve in “maintaining racial and class privilege and contributing to the oppression of marginalized learners.”
To fight this, Golden argues that professors of digital literacy must further explore how algorithms and software can be used to perpetuate privilege and oppression, optimistically concluding that “there are possibilities for interrupting these hegemonic processes.”
This isn’t the first time Golden has criticized how data can be used to perpetuate privilege. In 2014, for example, he published an article arguing that “we must expand our understanding of what counts as data,” since it can otherwise be used to discount students’ “identities” and “cultural practices.”
Campus Reform reached out to Golden for an interview, but did receive a response in time for publication.
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