In 2001, Congress adopted No Child Left Behind, key legislation that mandated annual testing and led to data-based decision making for schools. That was the same year I started teaching. The data — standardized tests required by the new law — revealed that our students, overall, struggled to read and do math anywhere near grade level.
Under President Barack Obama, the federal Race to the Top program demanded measurement of teacher impact as part of evaluations. By the time I became principal of a middle and high school, the data bug had infiltrated our methodology so much so that we effectively shut down all non-test-related activities for six days in the spring for state testing.
We’ve slid from a reasonable, necessary, straightforward question — are the students learning? — to the current state of education leadership: where school leaders and policymakers expect too much of data, over-test student learning to the detriment of learning itself, and get lost in their abundance of numbers.
LEADING THROUGH DATA
The leadership decision at stake is how much data to collect. The proper question for leaders to ask is: Will the data help us make better-enough decisions to be worth the cost of getting and using it? So far, the answer is no.
We wanted data to help us get past the problem of too many students learning too little, but it turns out that data is an insufficient, even misleading answer. It’s possible that all we’ve learned from our hyper-focus on data is that better instruction won’t come from more detailed information, but from changing what people do.
WHAT WE DO NEXT
Data, many times, is incredibly useful. But looking at it ever more closely, and ever more often, won’t make the students learn more. In every driven-by-data guide to instruction, the last step, after all the analysis, is to teach to where the student gaps are. Don’t try to turn teachers into data analysts; try, instead, to help them be better teachers
