Data and Accountability in the Classroom
Amendment 3 would add to schools' growing burden.
We live in the age of data. Every facet of our lives is analyzed in great detail to better understand how and why we do the things we do. One can find data for travel patterns based on cellphone usage, demographic data on spending habits from purchases made, data on the use of any given health care service by any given segment of the population, opinion data on every product and service imaginable, and much more. The technology of the digital age has pushed us to collect and store an immense quantity of data on every sort of human interaction, and the classroom has been no exception. But while we enjoy collecting all this data, we haven’t put much thought into how to analyze and use it.
Teacher assessment is a central focus of improving student outcomes. To collect relevant data, we conduct classroom observations to check teachers’ attitudes and approaches, give standardized tests to check student improvements, pore over teaching materials and plans to check for effectiveness, give surveys to students, parents and peers to check what others think about any given teacher, and more. This approach gives us a massive trove of data for every teacher in every classroom, in every school, in every district in the nation.
The trouble with data collection and analysis is that the data don’t just collect and analyze themselves! The proposed constitutional Amendment 3 ignores the fact that we are still learning what data are most relevant and how to best use them. It mandates the use of student standardized test performance data and pushes us away from our current process of experimentation and exploration that will at some point uncover the most relevant data and best performance management solutions.
Amendment 3 also ignores the cost and work it would take to make the kind of quantitative data it mandates useful for its intended purpose. A recent study from Vanderbilt (principaldatause.org) found that school administrators get this teacher performance data “like a fire hose” and lack the time it takes to adequately and appropriately collect, record, analyze and implement performance measures. As it turns out, simply telling people to use data to make evaluative decisions doesn't mean data suddenly become available or useful. If we want these data to be available quickly enough to make performance management decisions, we are also going to have to create user-friendly data management tools that provide easily readable assessments to administrators as soon as the data are validated.
Because our school systems are based on a year-to-year cycle, we have very little time to move from data collection to a set of information that can legitimately be used for teacher performance assessment. It is foolish to assume our administrators can do all this without some sort of tool or other additional resources to help along the way. Luckily for us, complicated statistical wizardry has largely been automated; we just need to create and implement something akin to Google Trends for school performance data. The teachers and public both have to be involved in this evaluation process for it to be useful in matching performance assessments to community expectations and to classroom realities.
In the process of creating and implementing elaborate and expensive standardized testing tools for assessment, Amendment 3 takes the authority to make key decisions away from the communities, parents and school boards that really understand their school districts and moves it toward state and federal politicians with very different goals.
In fact, data are often collected and reported not as a tool to promote public understanding and improve our public schools, but as a weapon to attack and undermine them. This does not improve public education, our communities or our political processes. There is still much to be learned to develop a truly useful performance-based measurement system for our teachers and schools. If we want to make the best decisions for our youths, we need to be adaptable to local needs and we need this to be a highly localized discussion that we all can learn from together. We are still exploring what information is relevant, how to collect it, how to analyze it and how to best apply what we learn. Neither politicians nor computers can adequately answer these questions for us.
Dave Overfelt is owner of Research Results LLC in Columbia.
No comments:
Post a Comment