Gone are the days when educators dismissed data as having only a limited utility for improving schools and school systems. What’s taken its place, argues Rick Hess, is “The New Stupid” — where data-based decision making and research-based practice “stand in for careful thought, serve as dressed-up rationales for the same old fads, or [are] used to justify incoherent proposals.”
In an article in Education Leadership, Hess describes first encountering the tendency to “energetically misuse data” during a presentation to a group of aspiring superintendents.
The group had recently read a research brief high-lighting the effect of teachers on student achievement as well as the inequitable distribution of teachers within districts, with higher-income, higher-performing schools getting the pick of the litter. The aspirants were fired up and ready to put this knowledge to use. To a roomful of nods, one declared, “Day one, we’re going to start identifying those high value-added teachers and moving them to the schools that aren’t making AYP.”
Now, although I was generally sympathetic to the premise, the certainty of the stance provoked me to ask a series of questions: Can we be confident that teachers who are effective in their current classrooms would be equally effective elsewhere? What effect would shifting teachers to different schools have on the likelihood that teachers would remain in the district? Are the measures in question good proxies for teacher quality? What steps might either encourage teachers to accept reassignment or improve recruiting for underserved schools?
My concern was not that the would-be superintendents lacked firm answers to these questions,” Hess recalls. “It was that they seemingly regarded such questions as distractions.”
The key is not to retreat from data, Hess counsels, ”but to truly embrace the data by asking hard questions, considering organizational realities, and contemplating unintended consequences. Absent sensible restraint, it is not difficult to envision a raft of poor judgments governing staffing, operations, and instruction—all in the name of ‘data-driven decision making.’”
This is smart, even heroic stuff.
