Do the Truffle Shuffle!!!
photo credit: mrpbody33

One of The Bee’s latest database features, published on 12/18/2009, offers aggregated site-specific data on the results of the state’s last physical fitness test for public school students. I don’t know what it is about these databases that rub me the wrong way, since I understand that they are simply making neat ways of displaying data that is already publicly available. But as I attempted to argue 18 months ago when the Bee published County workers’ salaries, it’s not about the data being public. It’s about the intent behind publishing it as a news story (beyond getting traffic for the site despite less and less good content every month).

We’re talking about children here, so if the intent behind this is to highlight that more work needs to be done to make sure kids are healthy — a proposition that nobody with eyeballs really needs help accepting — then that is an important message for parents that would be sufficiently backed up by the aggregate data alone. On the other hand: is 31% unhealthy and “just” 34% passing all portions of the test really all that skewed of a statistic? Maybe the test data merely points out that kids basically fall evenly into 3 categories of healthy, unhealthy, and neutral. According to statehealthfacts.org, a full 61% of California adults are overweight or obese. I can’t imagine that 89% of California adults would pass 3 of 6 comparable fitness measures, which 89% of students did according to the CDE data.

Most of all I don’t think this is a good thing to publish because the data is for 5th-, 7th- and 9th-graders, which means for the most part it singles out just one grade level at each school in the dataset. So even though you can’t identify individual children, it’s can’t feel great to be one of the kids at any given school who look the most unhealthy to have this fact called out in the local paper. Take the example of Camellia Basic, where the published data shows there are just 8 kids who scored as unhealthy.

Maybe I’m taking this too seriously. After all, I don’t think it takes a government study to tell you that these kids today are not as healthy as they should be. But something about this whole database thing really chaps my hide!