Data

Yesterday I attended a city-wide exhibition of school data. City administration prides itself on how successfully we have integrated "Data Teams" into our teaching. (A data team is a group of teachers who share the same courses, that meets regularly to discuss/evaluate strategies based on common assessments). Thus at the end of the year, school-wide data teams provide charts of our data, and explanations of what we did with it.

We were given a form to fill out for our administration to prove that we had attended the exhibition. It asked what we learned. Here is my reply.

I learned that schools in our district have given up trying to show improvement by massaging data, and now simply massage their narrative. In many cases scores got worse and the strategies used were declared successful.

I learned that many schools are proud of dismal results. One high school noted proudly that they had achieved 95% proficiency in the naming of the primary colors.

I have learned for our own purposes, that the data process is not and should not be about this kind of public display. This sort of exposition, especially the narratives declaring success, tends toward claims of success where honest analysis of the scores would lead to claims of failure.

Finally, a rational adult looking at most of these displays could easily see that our standards have dropped precipitously. However valuable the spirit of this process is it has become an opportunity to claim that what we are doing is working... when it probably isn't.