Living in Dialogue

Baby Einstein videos were supposed to make babies smarter by playing them classical music for hours on end. But guess what the research showed? The videos actually DECREASED the rate at which the little ones learned words! The Disney Corporation is actually offering refunds to the parents who wasted $15.95 on this miseducative junk. The hours and IQ points the children lost will never be recovered.

But at least Disney is minimally accountable for the dollars wasted on its product. Our government should be so scrupulous. Eight years ago we heard about the "Houston Miracle," the amazing test score gains that supposedly resulted from the high expectations set by school leaders there. Houston Superintendent Rod Paige was appointed by GW Bush to be Secretary of Education on the strength of these lofty results.

These results were used to justify the NCLB policies that hold schools accountable for test scores and under the belief that this would force them to improve.

But a few years later the Houston Miracle was debunked. It turned out that schools there systematically manipulated the system to generate better numbers. Students in the 9th grade were held back so as to avoid lowering the average scores on tenth grade tests. Thousands of dropouts were hidden. And principals received $5000 bonuses for their great statistics.

Now here we are and it is déjà vu all over again. Secretary Duncan is continuing and in many ways intensifying the practices of NCLB, based on the supposed successes he presided over as CEO of Chicago schools.

As former president Bush once said, "fool me once...shame on you ...you can't get fooled again." A report came out today that reveals that the ambitious program of school closures initiated under Duncan did not work. The report states: "there was almost no difference in achievement for students whose elementary schools were closed from 2001 to 2006, mostly because the schools they later went to were among the city's worst."

Nonetheless, Duncan has called for the "turnaround" of 5000 of the nation's worst schools, citing his success in Chicago as justification.

Other reports show that during Duncan's tenure in Chicago test scores improved very little, and the achievement gap actually widened.

To be fair, I do not believe standardized tests should be used as the only measure of success. However, the Duncan administration has made it clear that test scores will continue to be the primary drivers of reform, so it is only fair to apply this to his own system.

This week another big blow came to the credibility of Duncan's Race to the Top when the National Academy of Sciences released a strongly worded report questioning the research base of its reform strategies.

The NAS rarely takes such a public stand. The Board on Testing and Assessment (BOTA) made a number of sharp points responding to key elements of Race To the Top:

They warned against the use of the National Assessment of Educational Progress as means of checking achievement data for specific initiatives, because it is not designed to reveal performance at the local school or district level. They also warned that NAEP's validity flows from the low stakes attached to it. If it becomes important, schools will "teach to the test," and this will invalidate the results.

They are also very clear about the weakness of systems that rely on a single set of tests to measure achievement:

We encourage the Department to pursue vigorously the use of multiple indicators of what students know and can do. A single test should not be relied on as the sole indicator of program effectiveness. This caveat applies as well to other targets of measurement, such as teacher quality and effectiveness and school progress in closing achievement gaps. Development of an appropriate system of multiple indicators involves thinking about the objectives of the system and the nature of the different information that different indicators can provide. Such a system should be constructed from a careful consideration of the complementary information that is provided by different measures.

The use of the value-added model was also questioned, and the BOTA pointed out numerous specific problems with this approach.

1. Estimates of value added by a teacher can vary greatly from year to year, with many
teachers moving between high and low performance categories in successive years
(McCaffrey, Sass, and Lockwood, 2008).
2. Estimates of value added by a teacher may vary depending on the method used to
calculate the value added, which may make it difficult to defend the choice of a
particular method (e.g., Briggs, Weeks, and Wiley, 2008).
3. VAM cannot be used to evaluate educators for untested grades and subjects.
4. Most data bases used to support value-added analyses still face fundamental
challenges related to their ability to correctly link students with teachers by subject.
5. Students often receive instruction from multiple teachers, making it difficult to
attribute learning gains to a specific teacher, even if the data bases were to correctly
record the contributions of all teachers.
6. There are considerable limitations to the transparency of VAM approaches for
educators, parents and policy makers, among others, given the sophisticated statistical
methods they employ.

They conclude,

Even in pilot projects, VAM estimates of teacher effectiveness that are based on data for a single class of students should not used to make operational decisions because such estimates are far too unstable to be considered fair or reliable.

They point out that the large-scale tests currently used for accountability purposes are very different from the sorts of tests educators should use for more frequent checks on student understanding, and that the Department of Education should be careful not to promote the inappropriate use of such tests. This sentence jumped out at me:

Assessment of complex reasoning and problem-solving skills typically demands assessment formats that require students to generate their own extended responses rather than selecting a word or phrase from a short list of options.

It appears that Secretary Duncan is preparing to spend more than $4 billion of our money on reforms unsupported and even proven worthless by solid research and concrete experience. The hucksters that sold us Baby Einstein videos are giving refunds for their product. But Rod Paige and George W. Bush have not offered us a refund of the billions spent on NCLB. And we are getting ready to spend even more billions on the next surefire cures for our schools.

I do not know what combination of solid research, legal pressure and conscience prompted the Disney Company to offer refunds on Baby Einstein videos. But I think we need to figure it out, and apply the same combination to Arne Duncan and the Department of Education, because it looks as if we have another boondoggle in the making.

What do you think? Should we be demanding a refund for NCLB? How about Race to the Top?

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It may be a strange place to turn, but humans are learning about economics by studying the behavior of monkeys. As I learned this morning listening to Morning Edition's Planet Money segment, a primate ethologist by the name of Dr. Ronald Noe, from the University of Strasbourg, has been doing experiments with vervet monkeys. Monkeys, like humans, have a social structure. But with monkeys, grooming takes the place of money. High status monkeys are often groomed, and do very little grooming of others. Low status monkeys must earn their place in the monkey world by grooming their "betters."

Dr. Noe's team did a clever experiment. They taught a single low-status monkey how to open a special container filled with tasty apples, which were then available to all. Within an hour, this low-status money was enjoying new status, lying back and being groomed.

Then Dr. Noe taught a second monkey this ability. Now the first monkey was not the only one with this special ability - and guess what? The grooming she got dropped by half. The monkeys intuitively knew this skill was no longer so precious, and the "price" she was paid for it dropped accordingly.

This makes me think of two things related to education issues. First of all, we are constantly told that "all our students" must be prepared to go to college. The students themselves are told this will guarantee them a middle class income. But if the monkeys are any indication, the more of our students we get to college, the less special these abilities will be, and the lower the rewards will be for having the skills a college education gives us.

And let's take a look at the teaching profession. Teachers have some special skills, but, like can-opening monkeys, can be replaced relatively easily. The amount of skill or responsibility a job requires seems to actually have zero connection to the amount of pay. Just look at airline pilots, who must have thousands of hours of training, and have hundreds of lives in their hands - yet are paid miserably. Simply because there are plenty of people who want to be pilots, and are willing to work for peanuts.

There is a time-worn solution to this dilemma. The can-opening monkeys need a union! They need to be willing to act together to withhold their can-opening services to bargain for a decent rate of pay. The pilots' union has been greatly weakened by deregulation of the airline industry, which allowed regional carriers to make cut-rate contracts for pilots.

Teachers have two of the strongest unions still standing in a largely disorganized American workforce. But the strength of these unions has been greatly undermined, in part because the unions have been portrayed as opponents of educational reform. But if our profession is going to have decent pay, and the ability to advocate for ourselves in our working conditions, we absolutely need an organization that can bring us together to act together - and to withhold our services if necessary.

What do you think? Do teachers need unions?

Creative Commons image by JosephFischer

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Americans have grown accustomed to being on top. When fascism spread and the Japanese attacked in the 1940s, we retooled our factories and sent our soldiers to war. We rewarded our returning GIs with college educations and access to loans to buy homes. We extended assistance to our vanquished rivals and helped them rebuild their countries. We took advantage of the industrial vacuum created by the destruction of our rivals and, for a while, were on top of the world. But somehow, along the way, we got the idea that we were on top because we were smarter than everyone else.

That idea echoes in education reform rhetoric today. Sometimes it feels as if we are fighting the last war, with calls for a new Sputnik-fueled push for education to beat our economic rivals. Young people are told by our leaders that if they work hard and go to college, they will prosper. We are told that our economy will beat back threats from abroad if our workforce is well-educated. But I am feeling a bit skeptical about the promise of education to fix what is wrong with our economy.

It was the very smart and well-educated financial wizards who invented the derivatives and credit default swaps that have destroyed our economy. Their ingenuity was our downfall. Across the country college-educated people are finding themselves out of work, with few prospects for employment. Those that took out big loans to finance their educations are in the worst shape of all.

And higher education is becoming dramatically more expensive, and thus will soon be out of reach for even more people.

Brains and education are not enough. We need to be smart enough to save our economy from our own worst tendencies.

We are beginning to realize that wealth comes from producing real things. Wealth is produced when we create something of value to others. There is a limited value in financial services, but most of the trillions that industry generated over the past decade were illusory, and now that they have vanished we are all paying the price. The basis of our economy has to be growing things, building things, and harvesting energy. We need to get over the idea that we will get wealthy through speculation and catching the next bubble on the way up. Too many people get hurt when these bubbles pop.

We also need to reappraise what makes us feel wealthy. We all need a basic level of shelter and food, but beyond that, we can live in luxury if we appreciate the things that are free in our lives. The beauty that comes from art we create, the joy we get from walking in nature, the pleasure we get from the company of friends. These things are much more precious than the mansions and toys our culture has become fixated upon.

Our students also might do well to learn that as industry expanded after World War Two, labor unions expanded as well. Wages did not rise just because workers were more productive. We have seen huge increases in worker productivity over the past decade, but real wages have fallen for working people. Wages during the 1950s and 1960s rose because workers organized themselves into powerful labor unions that defended their interests. They acted together, because one worker was no match for a large corporation, but thousands together had some clout. The social and cultural changes of the past half-century were likewise the result of organization and collective action. We will need to act together to create the change we want.

We also need to press the reset button on our educational values. Our goal should not be the degree at the end of college. Our goal is knowledge and the ability to do useful, creative and productive things in the world. The quality of education needs to be measured not by how well we get our students to score on tests, but on how capable they are at interacting powerfully with the real world. Are they able to do skillful work? Are they able to express themselves through writing, music and art? Can they invent solutions to the problems that have landed in their laps?

No multiple choice tests can give us this data. This will be seen in the work our students do - the ways they are encountering the world. Are they learning about their own community and proposing solutions to the problems they face? Can they use a knowledge of history to understand what is unfolding around them? Are they using the skills of math and writing to express new ideas? Are they able to use science to investigate the local environment? To pose and answer their own questions?

Albert Einstein once said "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it." Our students are faced with a set of problems created by a Twentieth Century consciousness. We keep pushing them to work harder to fit into the molds for roles that no longer exist, as if that will magically sustain a system that is breaking down around us. It is time to let go of the illusions that have sustained this system. It is time to let our children help us re-imagine how things should be. Give them the permission they do not need to reshape our economy and culture, and create one that is sustainable, just and humane.

What do you think? Can we reshape our way of life? How can we best equip our students to meet the challenges of this new economy?

image by Anthony Cody

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Dr. J Myron Atkin is a professor (emeritus) of education at Stanford University. Eight years ago I was part of the NSF-funded CAPITAL Project (Classroom Assessment Project to Improve Teaching And Learning), a group of science teachers who worked with a team of researchers led by Atkin who were probing how teacher assessment practices would shift as we became aware of how much student learning could grow when we used powerful assessments. We learned about formative assessment, the value of specific teacher feedback, using rubrics and having students give feedback to one another. The researchers observed our teaching, but the heart of the work was reflections we did over the course of two years time. Atkin's belief was that assessment practices reflected deeply held values, and could only be shifted through processes that recognized this, and created space for teachers to wrestle with the values embedded in their customary practices as well as those in the new models. This thoughtful approach honors teachers as more than passive implementers of curriculum and assessment, but as thinking professionals. It also flows from a belief that daily classroom assessment, guided by the teacher, is among the most powerful levers we have for improving student understanding. This work resulted in the publication of a book, entitled Designing Everyday Assessment in the Science Classroom.

Dr. Atkin recently sent me a paper he published in the UK, entitled "What Role for the Humanities in Science Education Research?" (subscription required). In this article, he offers some insights into some issues that have cropped up recently around the nexus of education policy and research. I asked him some questions so he could share some of these thoughts with us.

Cody: Why is it that education research seems to be ignored or only cited when convenient in making education policy?

Atkin: Education policy, like all social policy, is undergirded by a set of values. Scientifically based educational research seldom addresses the often conflicting underlying values. It can't. Yes, education research can inform a decision about whether a particular method of teaching Newton's Laws seems more effective than another, but only if there is agreement about what should be taught about Newton's Laws. Teach students to state them and give examples? Teach them to state them and also understand the evidence that supports them? Understand the conception of motion that preceded Newton's Laws, better to understand their extraordinary contribution to human knowledge? Understand how Newton's Laws apply to novel situations? These kinds of questions about what should be included in the curriculum are best resolved by deliberations about what is of value educationally. And different people bring different values to the table. Scientific research alone is insufficient. What works is a different matter from what is of worth. Scientifically driven research can sometimes contribute to deciding the former. It is of little value with the latter.

Cody: What role does scientific evidence play in decisions about educational policy?

Atkin: It is often the case scientific research is cited to buttress a policy that has already been formulated on the basis of the educational values of the policy maker. When European high schools went comprehensive after World War II and moved away from different schools for students of different apparent academic ability, there was first a political decision to do so. The Swedes liked to consider themselves "scientific," so they commissioned an expensive and well-conducted study to collect data about schools that selected by ability and those that were "comprehensive." The study found that low-performing students did better in comprehensive schools. But the study was commissioned to legitimate a policy that already had been decided on the basis of a politically held position about the importance to Sweden's emerging view of itself as a more egalitarian society. Mixed-ability grouping at the secondary school level was a political priority. (The researchers did not examine the effects of mixed-ability grouping on high-performing students.)

We have come to the recognition that scientific research can be used to
legitimate policy -- despite the fact that different American think tanks predictably develop different recommendations about a given matter and despite the fact that they are staffed with people of equivalent academic credentials. The underlying values at each think tank make a difference in the recommendations in the report.

Cody: What sort of education research is of the most value in determining what course of action we should take?

Atkin: My own predilection is to focus more resources than at present to understanding what is happening in classrooms today. For example, if we're interested in improving English-language learning of six-year-olds whose first language is not English, let's identify classrooms where such learning seems to be occurring pretty well. Furthermore let's identify a range of classrooms where there appear to be differences in the classroom setting, the teacher's approach, the resources used, etc. -- yet all the approaches seem to be effective when knowledgeable people (other teachers, parents, school administrators, accreditation reports) make evaluations. Right now in this large country, many teachers are doing this work with six-year-olds relatively well -- but they're not all doing it the same way. The research community can help the profession and the public to understand variation in good practice, instead of looking for the one best way.

Teachers operate in different contexts, and they have their own strengths. Building on strength strikes me as a more effective method of improving education than solely trying to remedy weakness. The specific approaches to improving education stem from the teacher's professional and personal goals, as well as from circumstances in the class and community. If we're looking for metaphors, education improvement is more like evolution than engineering. Pushing the metaphor, each teacher works in a particular niche that has to be understood. There is enormous natural variation in American schools. Researchers would do well to focus on variation as well as similarity -- and at least do no harm.

Cody: What can be learned from more contextualized, small-scale studies?

Atkin: It's this point that I try to emphasize in my preceding comment. All kinds of challenges have been already addressed in the classrooms where a program seems to be going pretty well. Let's build on what we have, rather than implement new "solutions." Even in engineering, unanticipated side effects -- many of them counterproductive -- will arise. And if values shift, the side effects can begin to look like the main effects. We design heavy and large vehicles to go 90 miles per hour, but then people decide that fuel consumption or air pollution are more important than speed and cargo capacity. Companies with the best and brightest engineers go out of business. We design a program to teach reading to six-year-olds. Then we find out the decoding methods used are so aversive that the children taught by such methods do not read as much as students taught by less rigid methods.

Cody: What value is there in teacher action research?

Atkin: Teachers have enormous potential to improve their practice if they are encouraged to try -- and evaluate -- new approaches that grow from their own sense of how to improve their work. The effectiveness of teacher-conducted research on their own practices is enhanced when teachers work together in such an effort. How can we design assessments that more closely gauge what we really want to teach in seventh-grade science? What should we try? And what can we learn from each others' experience in the collaborative effort.

What do you think? Why is education research often ignored when policies are crafted? What kinds of research do you think are of greatest value?

Photo by J Myron Atkin.

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The latest report from EdWeek tells us that school districts are struggling to report how every dollar of stimulus funding has been spent. Much of the money went to states to prevent the layoffs of thousands of teachers.

Edweek reports:

"The reporting requirements are so huge and so vast; they're really quite onerous," said John Musso, the executive director of the Association of School Business Officials International, based in Reston, Va. For example, officials from across the spectrum of the federal government have issued hundreds of pages of guidance and regulations, much of it highly technical, that govern how stimulus spending is to be tracked and reported.

There is no doubt that tracking this spending will consume thousands of hours of time by District-level administrators. And this is at a time when everyone's top priority should be getting resources to our classrooms.

There should be accountability for taxpayer funds. However I have to wonder how come schools are held to these stringent standards, while other institutions who have received bail-out funds have had no accountability whatsoever. Today comes the news that in spite of the banks having received more than $800 billion last year, foreclosures are higher than ever and few homeowners have benefited from loan modifications that could save their homes.

Teachers are among the most responsible members of our society. We have the most powerful form of accountability greeting us every morning - those students who show up in our classrooms. We know we need to challenge them, communicate with parents, plan engaging lessons, and monitor their progress towards meeting our goals. The best schools are ones in which peers are accountable to one another for meeting high professional standards. We agree to collaborate together to set common goals, to share curricular resources, and figure out how to build a framework for success for our students.

We are told by Secretary Duncan and others that one key to improving student achievement is to tie teacher pay to test scores. However, teachers are only one of many factors that affect student performance, and the small number of students in a given class means that one or two very high or low students could completely skew results.

Meanwhile, performance bonuses go out to bank executives who have gambled and lost with company funds, their bets (and bonuses) covered by the taxpayers. It is thought that these perverse incentive structures that rewarded risk led to the financial collapse. Providing incentives for high test scores is also likely to have perverse effects -- increasing the tendency to narrow the curriculum to focus on tested subjects and test-like lessons. Meanwhile teacher pay is the first casualty of state budget shortfalls, and we are unlikely to make up the current cuts for years.

The Green Financial Advisor reports

1. The compensation of 29 CEOs increased in 2008 by more than 1,000%.

2. Nearly three-quarters of CEOs had increases in base salary, and only 3% saw a decrease.

Incredibly, in a year in which so many companies had dismal performance, only 3% of CEOs saw a decrease in pay, which is supposed to be linked to performance

Teachers have been unfairly painted as being afraid of accountability. We do need to improve our evaluation processes, and get teachers more involved in looking at one another's practice. There are robust models, such as the one developed by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, that actually look at teaching practice deeply. Seventy-four thousand teachers across the country have voluntarily submitted their work to this examination and met their rigorous standards. This is the sort of model our schools should be emulating. We need to shift our evaluation practices to involve teachers more directly, and to focus on deep reflection on evidence of the effectiveness of our teaching.

However, there is such a glaring double standard at work here, I believe it is time teachers begin to take our dismay beyond the teacher lunchroom. The next time our representatives show up at a town hall, I say we let them know where we stand!

What do you think? Is there a double standard at work regarding accountability? How should teachers get our voices heard?

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This news arrived this morning from across the Atlantic. The biggest report on education in the United Kingdom from the last forty years has reached a startling conclusion. The Sats test, currently given to eleven-year-old students, has had disastrous effects and should be abolished. The Sats test for 14-year olds was scrapped a year ago after a scoring fiasco in which results were delayed by months.

However the Labour-led government left in place the Sats for eleven-year-olds, on the grounds that this was essential to make primary schools accountable for results. However, an upcoming report is raising concerns that echo the debate here in the US over the effects on NCLB.

From the UK's Daily Telegraph:

The conclusions - by the Cambridge Primary Review - will represent a damning indictment of Labour's education reforms.

It will say that a "narrow" focus on English and maths has been at the expense of a more rounded education, leaving many children ill-prepared for secondary school.

The four-year review, led by Professor Robin Alexander, based at Cambridge University, will say that art, music, drama, history and geography need to be "vigorously re-asserted" in primary schools.

It is also expected to claim that science has been neglected following the implementation of Labour's "national strategies" in 1998 designed to improve standards in the three-Rs

But it is feared the Government will largely shun the report, which is being produced following submissions from 900 academics and teachers around the world.

Sound familiar?

The authors of the report, which has not yet been released, are expected to recommend that the tests be replaced with a system of teacher assessment.

What do you think? Should educators in the United Kingdom change course? What will it take to get our elected leaders and policymakers to respond to these concerns?

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Recent research has revealed what some of us have long known. The achievement gaps we discover when we begin testing students in kindergarten or the first grade began to manifest much sooner. Researchers at the University of Okefenokee in Florida, led by Dr. Theodore Pogo, have been studying infants and toddlers to see when they master the skills thought to be essential for these ages. Their research has revealed:

1. Some infants "latch on" right away, while others take quite a bit of instruction in learning how to breast feed.


2. Some defy the normal "walk at one, talk at two" expectations set by society. The most intelligent children walk at 9 months, and talk at a year and a half.


3. Some infants lag significantly behind their peers and do not talk until age two, or walk until age two-and-a-half!

The more advanced children are being intensively studied. Their ability to walk and talk earlier confers significant advantages on them. If they can start walking earlier, their physical development can be "fast-tracked," and thus they can be better prepared for success in kindergarten athletics. Research has shown that students gain confidence from success at such games as tag and playing on the monkey bars. Clearly those students who walk weeks or even months earlier than their peers will have significant advantages in these competitive arenas.

Early talkers also have significant advantages. They can begin building the vocabularies they will need for success on the tests they will take in the first grade, and can also respond when parents begin to review the new words on their first picture flash cards. They can also begin to learn their alphabet so they know which letters to bubble on the tests.

Researchers are also studying the parents of these children. Their working hypothesis is that these parents held unusually high expectations for their children. These parents did not simply accept it when the children grunted meaninglessly. They withheld food until the child said "Banana" clearly. To encourage walking, toys were placed out of reach so the child would have to walk to get them. Most powerfully, clear learning targets were set by these parents, and explicitly demonstrated for the toddlers.

Unfortunately there are also children who lag behind the norms. These children are of particular concern, because the existence of this early achievement gap means that many of our parents have failed, and calls in to question our system of parenting. These parents are assumed to have set low expectations for their offspring. These children were allowed to crawl around the floor like animals, instead of being shown the proper mode of upright bipedal locomotion. These children were apparently given food even when they squawked or squealed like little piglets, rather than having the food provided only when requested using proper English.

Low expectations results in these poor outcomes - but in our current system of parenting, where are the consequences? If we are serious about closing this achievement gap, we need attention-getting consequences for success or failure. Policymakers have been hard at work and have come up with several new ideas which can be implemented soon. Toddlers who can demonstrate their ability to walk and talk on a standard walk/talk test will qualify for early admittance to kindergarten. This will allow them to complete high school and college a year early, which means they get a head start on all their peers, and more importantly, an additional year of earnings once they graduate. Those earnings could be significant! Furthermore, their parents will be rewarded because the offspring will therefore be off to college and out of the house a year earlier, saving additional dollars (not to mention headaches!)

Toddlers who are behind the curve are currently escaping detection. The standard walk test should be given at age one, and the talk test at age two. Those who are not at appropriate age level in their skills should be placed in special motivational classes led by individuals equipped with research-proven scripted curriculum to ensure uniform opportunities for skill acquisition. We can no longer afford to leave this to chance - too many children are being left behind before the race has even begun!

We all know the starting gun in the race for success sounds the moment that doctor slaps that baby's pink butt. Effective parents take advantage of every minute to prepare their little one to win this race - and all we ask is that they teach their babies to walk and talk. We have turned a blind eye to the achievement gap in this area for far too long. It is time that ineffective parents are identified and helped to improve, or encouraged to give their children up for adoption by other, more capable parents, before irreversible harm is done.

So I offer my thanks to the Florida team. Our policymakers can get to work right away, armed with this potent research, and in a few years, all our children can live up to our expectations that they be normal and hit their age appropriate learning targets. This will surely make us all much more competitive in the Race to the Top!

What do you think? When should the Race to the Top begin? What can be done to close the toddler gap?

Image provided through Creative Commons, by mbrubeck

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Many of our schools these days are guided by a business school practice known as Data-Driven Decision-Making (DDDM). This approach means that we do not base decisions on whim or convenience, but rather rely on actual student achievement outcomes to guide us. The first step in this process is determining which data we actually care about. That key decision has been made for us in the public schools by the mandates of NCLB. The data that matter most are student test scores in language arts and math. Data-Driven Decision-Making means we then must make choices that will increase those scores.

The term "Data-Driven Decision-Making" has a sort of value-neutral, rational sound to it. It means we are basing our choices on facts, that we are willing to make tough choices in the interest of student achievement. That should be good news, right?

But the choices that are made actually do carry value judgments, and I am not sure that we are considering all the relevant data when we make these decisions.

A few weeks ago, a San Diego area teacher named Ellen posted the following comment to this blog. She wrote:

I can see the disparity on a daily basis, as the tight economy and the effects of NCLB with its relentless pursuit of annual "progress" narrow the scope of my students' education. Where once students had the opportunity to express themselves in art, music or organized sports, they are now forced into the straightjacket of language arts and math.

I am required to have a daily 2 1/2 hour language arts block (using a scripted program, no less) and a 1 1/2 hour math block. Science was recently added to this limited curriculum because it is now tested on the CSTs, but there are no hands-on experiments because of the time constraints and lack of equipment. Science consists of students reading from a textbook and answering multiple choice comprehension questions in a workbook.

Recently our school celebrated an increase in test scores, but teachers were castigated because the English Learner subgroup did not pass.

It appears that the program Ellen describes has, in fact, resulted in increased test scores in Language Arts and Math. Thus, according to the rules of Data-Driven Decision-Making, it should be considered a success. But Ellen's description has me wondering about the nature of the data we are relying upon, and what questions we might ask to uncover additional data.

1. The CST data we are using measures primarily language arts and math performance. What information might we be missing as a result of being driven by this narrow set of data?
2. What academic, cultural and physical activities were cut to make room for the daily regime of 150 minutes of Language Arts and 90 minutes of Math? Has this data been sought?
3. What might the impact of the elimination or reduction of hands-on science, history, art, music and PE be on the long-term success of our students? Has success in math and language arts come at the expense of future success in other subjects? Is this question being asked?

Scientists know that the data one collects depends on the questions we ask. It is possible to go a long way down the wrong path if we focus on the narrow set of questions posed by NCLB.

The underlying issues behind my questions are ones of equity. These intensive language arts and math programs are motivated by concerns about inequitable outcomes for the mostly Latino and African American students attending the affected schools. But there are also equity concerns raised by the time taken that must come at the expense of other subject areas. It is the higher-performing schools that have more time for science, history, art, etc. because they are not obliged to spend 90 minutes a day on math and two and a half hours a day on language arts.

This raises a bigger question about Data-Driven Decision-Making in general. This term is used in a way that implies an objective, value-neutral focus on results. In fact, the data is so limited that the decisions one makes are constrained within a narrow range of options. The data gathered carries a set of values that have been determined, in this case by priorities set by NCLB.

Another business school term is "opportunity cost." There is no free lunch. If our school communities wish to make student achievement on math and language arts our highest priority - over science, history, art, PE, and music, then at the very least we need to be aware of what we are giving up in the bargain. I have a problem with policymakers and school leaders making this decision without acknowledging that there are in fact choices being made, and that there are tradeoffs, and that these are decisions that have values embedded within them. I have a problem when we do not even measure the impact these choices are making in other areas, and then we act as if our decisions are driven by pure data.

What do you think? What data is missing from the decisions being made at our schools?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 4:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBacks (0)