Sarah Wysocki is a Washington, D.C.-area teacher whose career was jeopardized in 2007 by an assessment tool called IMPACT, a data-backed approach to weeding out low-performing teachers. Wysocki was fired from her job after receiving a low score based on IMPACT’s algorithm, which promised to fairly evaluate teachers. But IMPACT was imperfect in that it couldn’t measure the human factors that go into teaching and learning (such as struggles students might be facing at home), so O’Neil characterizes it as a “weapon of math destruction.”
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Sarah Wysocki Character Timeline in Weapons of Math Destruction
The timeline below shows where the character Sarah Wysocki appears in Weapons of Math Destruction. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Introduction
At this time, Sarah Wysocki was a fifth-grade teacher in Washington, D.C. who was beloved by her students and had...
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There were too many factors that go into the process of teaching and learning, Wysocki argued, to create an algorithm that would quantify them. Without huge collections of data points...
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At the start of her last year at MacFarland Middle, Sarah Wysocki saw that many incoming fifth graders from a nearby elementary school had scored well on...
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...to create clout, and they ignore the people they hurt in the process—people like Sarah Wysocki. O’Neil announces her intent to take her readers on a tour of “the dark side...
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Chapter 7: Sweating Bullets
...alarm was the root of programs that would derail the lives of people like Sarah Wysocki. Teachers are workers too, and they are extremely vulnerable to WMDs.
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