March 2006 — Features
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ISKME Special Series Part 2: Data Use and School Reform
T.H.E. Journal, in partnership with the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), prepared this special four-part report on data-driven decision-making.
New technologies have made data gathering easier than ever. Educators now must confront one big question: How can the data be used to improve student achievement?
IN A TIME OF WIDENING achievement gaps, accountability mandates, decreased budgets, and high turnover of school leaders, K-12 educators have grown determined to substantiate their decision-making with hard data. This new attention to data coincides with the advent of improved information technologies, faster Internet connections, and easierto- use applications and interfaces, which are supplying administrators with mounds of data on all aspects of the education enterprise. But the questions being raised in public forums and in private corridors reduce to this: What problems does the data help us solve?
Those on the cutting edge of these developments are asking themselves and others the tough questions. Education leaders are trying to better understand how to reform their systems, districts, and schools to improve student achievement. “We can’t continue to design our schools in a way that leaves some kids falling through the cracks,” says Gregory Peters, the co-principal at Leadership High School in San Francisco. “We have to personalize and know our students well.”
With the current emphasis on statewide, districtwide, and schoolwide testing and assessment, there is no shortage of data out there. A growing field of consultants, vendors, and advisors are helping districts and schools determine what data to collect, how to provide confidential access to it, and how to make meaningful inferences from data that will ultimately bring results.
Making Sense of It All
With so much data circulating, the first issue facing us is: What should we be keeping track of, and what do we do with the data once we have it? And how do we recognize good data from bad?
“It’s not about whether or not data is a good thing,” says Sandra Stein, CEO of the New York City Leadership Academy. “It’s about paying attention to what we observe. When people ask, ‘What does the data show?’ they are often referring to test scores only.” The NYC Leadership Academy trains both aspiring and new principals in New York City schools on how to slice and dice data to get beyond test scores. “We use data to teach school leaders how to be instructional leaders and better managers,” says Stein. “They learn how to look at several indicators of student performance, such as teacher practice and curricular fit, at very granular levels.”
So her participants understand what kinds of data are relevant and what to take from them, in the very beginning of the program Stein provides them with a simulated environment. “They have school report cards, examples of teacher practice, written observations, teacher files, student work, floor plans, videotapes of teachers,” she says, “and people come in to role-play various school community members. So the ways in which data and information come to them can be very different.
