5/3/05 -- If your school board is interested in data-driven decision making, don’t make the mistake of focusing too much of your attention on academic performance. You’ll be missing 90 percent or more of the data that will tell you how to improve your schools.
That’s the conclusion of Victoria L. Bernhardt, executive director of Education for the Future and a professor at California State University, who spoke at a Focus on Education Lecture during the conference.
To truly understand what’s needed to boost student learning, she says, school boards must analyze four key types of data: academic outcomes; student demographics; the perceptions of students, staff, and community; and school processes.
High-stakes testing has encouraged school boards to focus almost all of their attention on academic outcomes and demographics, Bernhardt says. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, for example, it’s mandatory to aggregate such data as the test scores of fourth-grade Hispanics.
But this data analysis tells only part of the story, she says, and can lead to incomplete responses. For example, some schools assume that adding before and after-school tutoring programs are the answer to poor academic achievement.
That might well be the case. But Bernhardt suggests a closer look at other data. Examine your school processes -- such as how teachers are assigned to schools -- and you might find that lower-achieving students are in classes with the youngest, least-experienced teachers.
A survey of students to find out what your “customers” experience every day also will be enlightening. In one survey of 30,000 students over three years, Bernhardt reports, students indicated that the most important factor in their ability to learn was a teacher who cared about them.
When asked what they meant, students said their interest and effort in the classroom depended on teachers who knew their names, cared if they learned, challenged them, held high expectations for them, and made learning fun.
Giving that information back to the staff was “very powerful,” Bernhardt says.