Driven by Data E-Book

Paul Bambrick-Santoyo

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 370

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

Driven by Data offers valuable tips and general guidelinesabout data-based methods and the difficulties surrounding theimplementation of data-driven instruction. Through a CD-ROM, thisguidebook provides all the tools needed to launch data-driveninstruction effectively, such as an implementation rubric, meetingagendas, calendars, assessment templates, and more. Written by PaulBambrick-Santoyo, who has worked with over 1,000 schools across thenation, the book clearly shows how to maneuver through assessmentsand statistics. Bambrick-Santoyo offers vital tips, such as: how tocreate a data culture, how to run a successful data analysismeeting, how to write quality assessments, and how to deal withresistance from your teachers. The book also includes twenty casestudies of high-performing schools. School leaders will find thisresource useful for achieving remarkable results and immense gains,regardless of the school's background, leader, or demographic. Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials arenot included as part of eBook file.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Praise

Title Page

Copyright Page

About the Author

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

THE FRAMEWORK: WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE DATA-DRIVEN?

THE EIGHT MISTAKES THAT MATTER

ROADSIDE DISTRACTIONS: FALSE DRIVERS

IDENTIFYING THE REAL DRIVERS: AN EFFECTIVE METHODOLOGY

PART ONE - The Framework

Chapter 1 - Assessment

AN OPENING STORY

TOWARD MEANINGFUL RIGOR: CREATING THE ROAD MAP

INTERIM ASSESSMENTS VERSUS IN-THE-MOMENT ASSESSMENTS

THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF EFFECTIVE ASSESSMENT

WRITING OR SELECTING THE RIGHT INTERIM ASSESSMENT

ASSESSMENT MYTHS DISPELLED

BOILING DOWN TO THE ESSENCE: THE FIVE CORE DRIVERS OF ASSESSMENT

APPLICATION: FIRST STEPS FOR TEACHERS AND LEADERS

Chapter 2 - Analysis

AN OPENING STORY

FOUNDATIONS OF EFFECTIVE ANALYSIS

DATA REPORTS: CHARTING A COURSE TO SUCCESS

RESULTS ANALYSIS: GOING TO THE POOL

FAST TURNAROUND—LAYING THE FOUNDATION FOR EFFECTIVE ACTION

THE ANALYSIS MEETING: TEACHER AND LEADER SIDE BY SIDE

APPLICATION: FIRST STEPS FOR TEACHERS AND LEADERS

Chapter 3 - Action

CHOOSING—TO ACT

THE ACTION PLAN

PUTTING IT INTO PRACTICE: ACTION IN THE CLASSROOM

ACTION OUTSIDE THE CLASSROOM

ACCOUNTABILITY: ROLE OF THE SCHOOL LEADER

GROUP WORK THAT WORKS: THE RESULTS MEETING PROTOCOL

STUDENT ENGAGEMENT: TAKING ACTION INTO THEIR OWN HANDS

APPLICATION: FIRST STEPS FOR TEACHERS AND LEADERS

Chapter 4 - Culture

AN OPENING STORY

DEVELOPING CULTURE

IDENTIFYING AND DEVELOPING THE RIGHT LEADERSHIP TEAM

THE CALENDAR

THE LARGEST ROCK OF ALL: EFFECTIVE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FOR LEADERS AND TEACHERS

APPLICATION: FIRST STEPS FOR TEACHERS AND LEADERS

Chapter 5 - Overcoming Obstacles

ASSESSMENT QUESTIONS

ANALYSIS QUESTIONS

ACTION QUESTIONS

CULTURE QUESTIONS

PART TWO - Leading Professional Development on Data-Driven Instruction

Chapter 6 - Leading Professional Development

FOUNDATIONS OF EFFECTIVE ADULT PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

FIVE FREQUENT FAILURES ASSOCIATED WITH ADULT LEARNING

THE BEST-KEPT SECRET TO GREAT PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

TALE OF THREE PRESENTATIONS: A SAMPLE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT SESSION ON ASSESSMENT

THE STRATEGIES THAT MATTER

MANAGE TIME

INSPIRE

CONCLUSIONS

Chapter 7 - Framework

ACTIVITY 1—SETTING THE RATIONALE

ACTIVITY 2—HIGHLIGHTING PITFALLS

Chapter 8 - Assessment

ACTIVITY 3—PRINCIPLES OF ASSESSMENT

Chapter 9 - Analysis

ACTIVITY 4—INTRO TO ANALYSIS

ACTIVITY 5—TEACHER-PRINCIPAL ROLE PLAY

ACTIVITY 6—LEADING EFFECTIVE ANALYSIS MEETINGS

Chapter 10 - Action

ACTIVITY 7—INTRO TO ACTION

ACTIVITY 8—RESULTS MEETING PROTOCOL

Chapter 11 - Culture

ACTIVITY 9—BUILDING A DATA-DRIVEN CULTURE

ACTIVITY 10—START-UP SCENARIOS

Chapter 12 - Agenda for Leadership Workshop

COMPREHENSIVE LEADERSHIP WORKSHOP

Appendix - Highlights from the CD-ROM

Notes

Bibliography

Index

How to Use the CD-ROM

“This is the most important work our schools need to do, and Paul Bambrick-Santoyo is the master. Without a doubt, Paul’s expertise has been the key to our student achievement gains. His insights have provided our school leadership and, more importantly, our teachers with the skills to use the data to improve their instruction and ensure all of our students are successful.”

—Jennifer Niles, founder and head of school, E.L. Haynes Public Charter School, Washington, D.C.

“Driven by Data is much more than a compilation of chronicles about schools that have made outstanding progress. Paul Bambrick-Santoyo’s work not only shares the results, but actually tells the story of how the results were achieved. This invaluable book is indeed a desk reference for any instructional leader seeking a concrete, data-driven solution to problems in his or her school or district.”

—Jarvis T. Sanford, managing director, The Academy for Urban School Leadership

“Driven by Data is an inspiring and encouraging manifesto of how schools can make significant student learning gains by using data-driven instruction. Paul provides the proof and the tools that guarantee high expectations and rigor in any school’s daily routine. This model should be replicated everywhere across the country.”

—Turon Ivy, former director of Chicago International Charter School, Bucktown Campus

“Every leader who is accountable to increase student achievement should read Paul Bambrick-Santoyo’s book, Driven by Data. I have been fortunate enough to have worked with Paul prior to becoming a principal, and learned from him how to best implement his theories on how to assess, analyze, and respond to student data.”

—Sean Conley, principal, The Morrell Park Elementary/Middle School, Baltimore, Maryland

“There are many books on the topic of data-driven instruction, but Paul provides a true road map for approaching this important work. The book is all inclusive: research-based strategies, instructions for the practitioner, and evidence of success.”

—Tiffany Hardrick, co-founder and principal, Miller-McCoy Academy for Mathematics and Business

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bambrick-Santoyo, Paul, 1972-

Driven by data : a practical guide to improve instruction / Paul Bambrick-Santoyo.

p. cm.

Includes index.

eISBN : 978-0-470-59438-4

1. Education-United States-Data processing-Case studies. 2. Educational tests and measurements- United States-Case studies. 3. Educational assessment-United States-Case studies. 4. School

improvement programs-United States-Case studies. 5. School management and organization-United States-Case studies. I. Title.

LB1028.43.B35 2010

371.27’1-dc22

2009046005

PB Printing

About the Author

Paul Bambrick-Santoyo has spent seven years at North Star, and during that time the network has seen dramatic increases in performance in student achievement, reaching 90/90/90 status (90 percent free or reduced lunch, 90 percent students of color, 90 percent proficient on state assessments) in almost every category and grade level, making North Star one of the highest-achieving urban schools in New Jersey. Bambrick-Santoyo is currently a managing director of Uncommon Schools, uniting North Star to a community of some of the highest-achieving urban schools in the country. In that work he is currently managing the expansion of North Star into a network of three elementary schools, three middle schools, and a high school by 2011. He has trained more than 1,800 school leaders nationwide in his work at Uncommon Schools and as the data-driven instruction faculty member for New Leaders for New Schools, the leading national urban school leadership training program. Prior to joining North Star, he worked for six years in a bilingual school in Mexico City, where he founded the International Baccalaureate program at the middle school level, led significant gains in English test score results, and was named Teacher of the Year in 1999. He earned a B.A. in social justice from Duke University (1994) and his M.Ed. in school administration via New Leaders for New Schools from the City University of New York—Baruch College (2003).

To all school leaders, teachers, and staff—that we may build schools that guarantee the highest levels of learning for every child; our children most certainly deserve them.

Acknowledgments

The ideas in Driven by Data were formed and shaped through work with thousands of schools across the country. Each interaction with a school leader—and each opportunity to give a workshop—helped sharpen the focus of the model presented here and allowed it to be tested in a wide variety of environments. All those who put it to the test and gave me feedback along the way had a profound influence on the end product.

First and foremost, Dan Rauch was just a college student with no prior experience when he immersed himself into the work of forming this book with me. With a tremendous talent for grasping the data-driven model, and a brilliance for putting thoughts into writing, he shaped the initial drafts of many of the chapters in this book. His footprint remains embedded here, and it is a sure sign of the future success that will come to him in any field he chooses.

When it came to finding probing thought partners for the ideas in this book, none were more present than Kim Marshall and Mark Murphy. In their respective work as principals and leaders of principals, they gained invaluable insight into what worked—and what didn’t—in schools nationwide. From Kim’s multipage feedback letters after workshops to Mark’s pre-workshop planning meetings, their guidance as friends and colleagues helped make sure this work was accessible and usable for all school leaders.

Every story has a beginning, and this one occurred when James Verrilli and I traveled to Amistad Academy in New Haven, Connecticut, to see this “new world” of data-driven instruction. A person of utter integrity, Jamey remained steadfast in the implementation of this model, even when we had no real certainty that we would succeed. I wish everyone gets the chance to work with someone as inspiring and humble as Jamey. Behind the scenes, Jamey’s co-founder Norman Atkins planted the seed: he was willing to entrust his legacy to me and gave me a perfectly formed launching pad to grow as a learner and a leader. His mentorship was fundamental to the leader I have become today.

Honing this to perfection were the school leaders at North Star and Uncommon Schools, some of whom are highlighted in the success stories in this book. Julie Jackson, Jesse Rector, Mike Mann, Shana Pyatt, and Juliann Harris put this work to the test every day in our North Star schools. John King, Doug Lemov, Brett Peiser, and Evan Rudall brought their own expertise in the areas of planning, instruction, culture, and operations, and they integrated the data-driven model within our larger framework for school excellence.

The real heroes of this book are all the school leaders who have launched this work successfully and are transforming urban education nationwide. Only twenty of those school leaders were able to be highlighted in this book’s success stories, but there are so many more!

While the school leaders are the heroes of the book, the heroes of my heart are my wife and children. Ana, Maria, and Nicolas were all quite young during the formation of this book, and they endured many an afternoon of me writing on the computer or staring thoughtfully off into space! Gaby stood by me through it all, supporting me in my weakest moments and providing me daily inspiration of how to love and listen.

Thank you to each and every one of you who have had an impact in the field. With your help, we will improve and reshape education nationwide.

Foreword

If you’ve ever taught in an American public school, you know the drill. The principal alerts you to her upcoming annual trip to “observe” your class. You sweat the preparation of what you hope is your best lesson. She jots notes in the back of your room. Your kids muster their least disruptive behavior, perhaps on account of the rare presence of two additional humongous eyeballs on their necks.

A few weeks later (if all goes well, not a few months later), there’s the post-observation conference. The principal slides a standard-issue form across her desk. She’s rated you “satisfactory” in most of the boxes, “needs improvement” in a few. Should you dispute the recommendations in the space allotted on the bottom of the template or smile and pledge to do better? Best-case scenario: the principal supports you, knows her stuff, and shares helpful feedback on your craft—for example, how you can be more engaging in your delivery. More typically, she encourages you to pick up the pace so that you can “cover” the required curriculum by year’s end or urges you to “integrate technology” per the district mandate to modernize. You sign your review, close your classroom door, and resume teaching, relieved you won’t have to relive these rituals for another year. As both professional development and accountability, this has been our education system’s losing playbook for as long as the oldest teachers you can remember can themselves remember.

Now comes Paul Bambrick-Santoyo—a brilliant instructional leader and trainer of principals—charging onto the field like a middle linebacker with the game-changing volume you’re holding in your hands, Driven by Data. Mr. Bambrick—as he’s known to students—has the instructional equivalent of linebacker eyes. His peripheral vision catches all the subtle teacher moves in any one lesson, and he’s peripatetic, ranging widely across a school, weaving in and out of classrooms. Gone are the set-piece annual observations. But what’s really significant here—in light of the broken observational paradigm—is that Bambrick has trained his eyes on the students as much as the teachers. The first question provoked by his work is ontological, the schooling equivalent of the fabled tree-forest conundrum:

If there’s teaching going on, but the students aren’t learning, is it really teaching?

I first met Bambrick in the late summer of 2002 when he arrived at North Star Academy. Five years earlier, I had co-founded and then co-led North Star with one of the greatest teachers and principals of our generation, James Verrilli. It was one of New Jersey’s very first charter public schools, located in the city of Newark, a troubled district that had been taken over by the state. We’d begun with seventy-two fifth and sixth graders, picked from a random lottery, 90 percent of whom were eligible for a subsidized lunch, 99 percent of them black or Latino, and who scored—on average—worse than their Newark peers on the state test. North Star was immediately successful at generating huge demand from low-income families, creating an electric student culture that was celebrated in the media and copied by countless other schools, and posting initial test state results that were well above the district average.

Bambrick had been sent to us by an organization with which I’d been involved—New Leaders for New Schools—as the principalship equivalent of a medical resident. He was supposed to spend the year with us and learn how to be a school leader. Had he been born a century ago, my hunch is that Bambrick would have been a priest. Instead he’s tethered his humble but deep commitment to social justice—most manifest in two years of Jesuit Community Service as a campus minister in Mobile, Alabama—to the work of closing the achievement gap, one of the most pressing issues of our day. At the same time, he generated a strong sense of academic rigor and the value of high educational expectations and standards during six years as an AP English teacher, basketball coach, and assistant principal at an International Baccalaureate high school in Mexico City, where his wife is from and where he started his family. A 1994 graduate of Duke University, Bambrick is a chronically curious student of how humans learn and a habitual problem solver. He found in North Star a school committed to innovation and excellence.

At North Star and literally hundreds of other schools, I’d watched teachers covering an ambitious geometry curriculum, the Diary of Anne Frank, an entire earth science textbook; observed teachers standing in front of the classroom covering World Wars I and II, or assigning students to write e-mails on laptops to pen pals in Australia. But what math, science, reading, writing, and history had the students really learned? What portion of the intended skills and covered knowledge had lodged in their brains? Where did the lessons fail to meet their mark? Who wasn’t getting what?

Many strong teachers know the answers to these questions because they constantly “check for understanding” throughout their classes, and the very best adjust their instruction to meet the learning objectives. But it’s hard even for the best teachers, and nearly impossible for novices, to track student progress in an organized, effective way in real time. Novice teachers are, after all, learning to teach, but are they teaching to learn? It’s a well-worn convention for teachers to give weekly quizzes or unit tests, which should ostensibly address our core problem, except when those assessments—as is so often the case in the vast majority of schools—lack alignment with the meaningful standards for which students are meant to gain mastery.

As a result, for decades American public schools have given students passing marks, promoted them to the next grade, and then (in the summer) received state test scores showing an alarming number of those promoted students lack basic proficiency, much less mastery, of the concepts they were supposed to learn. Come the fall, even when enterprising teachers use those state test results to inform their instruction, it’s already too late. Students have moved on to new teachers and teachers have moved on to new students. Such a vicious cycle tragically harms precisely those children who need the greatest attention: those who come into the lowest-performing public schools with the weakest skills and the most challenging social and economic circumstances. Without the ability to diagnose and support their progress toward meeting college-prep learning standards on a systematic basis, too many adults consign too many of our children to a destiny based on their demography.

About the same time Bambrick started at North Star, another young leader named Doug McCurry had begun to build data systems to track student learning at Amistad Academy, a high-performing charter school serving low-income students in New Haven, Connecticut. Every six weeks, Amistad administered “Curriculum-Based Measurements”—aligned with the state standards—to track student progress. One day I watched as McCurry’s team, teacher by teacher, came to see him armed with data on which students had learned which state standards. They used the data to diagnose, for example, which individual students were struggling with multiplying fractions.

To me, it looked like McCurry had created the school equivalent of what data-driven leaders had done to revolutionize public service, business, politics, and sports. In the mid-1990s, for instance, New York City Police Chief William Bratton armed precinct captains and officers with fast data so that they could deploy resources effectively to fight crime. At about the same time, Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane armed his scouts with new metrics to find productive, undervalued baseball players.

Not long after, I encouraged my colleagues to spend time watching McCurry’s data meetings in New Haven. Bambrick did that—and he also went to school on the whole subject. He looked at how the public schools in Brazosport, Texas, and other districts had been quietly doing similar work over the preceding decade. He led a team of teachers in writing a set of interim assessments aligned with the New Jersey state standards; used the assessments to push our program toward increasing levels of college-ready rigor and expectation for all students; designed an effective spreadsheet system for tracking student progress; and, along with co-leader and co-founder James Verrilli, changed the culture of the school so that our leaders and teachers gathered around data to drive student learning. Our teachers began to engage and own responsibility for upping the rigor of student learning, re-teaching failed lessons, analyzing errors in understanding, and creating better assessment tools. Their meetings moved from the sad convention of post-observation conferences to data meetings in which they fought as tenaciously for student achievement gains in their classrooms as Bratton’s police officers battled crime on New York City streets.

Changing the mind-set of teachers and the culture of a school so that team members are enthusiastic about assessment; this is precisely what takes a very good school like North Star and makes it great. Bambrick and Verrilli made that happen. Within two years of his first day on the job, Bambrick replaced me—and within three he’d become the managing director of the burgeoning network of North Star Academies, which in the fall of 2010 will be three middle schools, two elementary schools, and a growing high school. At the same time, North Star helped birth and is a part of a growing charter management organization, Uncommon Schools, a network that will eventually include more than thirty schools and twelve thousand students in Newark, New York City, and upstate New York.

Meanwhile, the idea of data-driven instruction has also caught on in a larger educational universe, and Bambrick has become a pathfinder on the entire subject, having trained more than one thousand principals serving a half-million children in cities all over the country. The results can be seen not only in the twenty case studies in this book but in schools and classrooms nationwide.

As it happens, leaders and teachers often arrive at his sessions highly skeptical about an overtested culture. They imagine that data-driven instruction is an elaborate stratagem for promoting “test prep.” They often show up because under the accountability pressure generated by federal No Child Left Behind law, they are desperate to find a magic formula to improve their state test results and avoid public censure. At the highest conceptual level, NCLB—despite all of its faults—has indeed focused educators on accountability for student achievement in low-income communities. If NCLB gets them through the door, Bambrick is waiting for them on the other side with meaningful strategies and ideas that are at the heart of this wonderfully accessible and practical book. What’s most remarkable about his training—and it’s captured in this book—is that Bambrick gets the adults to “live the learning.” Instead of lecturing or hectoring his audience, he creates a highly energetic learning environment where his audience does the heavy intellectual work. I hope his next book is on this subject!

In the meantime, we’re fortunate that he has codified his work in this book. Data-driven instruction is not a panacea. But—developed and used in the way that Bambrick describes—we have here one of the more important tools to ensure that America’s classrooms are not simply filled with teaching but are assuredly alive with learning, growth, and meaningful achievement for all students.

October 2009 Norman Atkins

Norman Atkins is the founder and CEO of Teacher U; the founder, former CEO, and board chair of Uncommon Schools; the co-founder and former co-director of North Star Academy; and the former co-executive director of the Robin Hood Foundation.

Preface

This book can be used in many ways. It is divided into two parts: the practical framework for effective data-driven instruction (Part One) followed by the professional development activities needed to build the framework (Part Two).

I strongly recommend that you do not jump to Part Two (the professional development materials) without first reading Part One. Part One explains many of the pedagogical choices made in Part Two and can help you avoid the common pitfalls that have ensnared schools struggling to implement data-driven instruction effectively. Also noteworthy is the Application section at the end of Chapters One through Four. This section offers concrete first steps targeted to three audiences: teachers, school-based leaders (principals, coaches, instructional leaders, and the like), and multicampus or district-level leaders. In this way, you should be able to apply the concepts in Part One directly to your role in your school community.

If you’re not yet sure if this framework will work for you, please start by reading some of the case studies dispersed throughout the book (use the Contents to identify the location of each one). The sheer quantity of these stories—describing success in such a wide variety of contexts—should show the flexibility and universality of this approach. In each case, the key drivers implemented are highlighted so that you can see the connection between theory and practice.

The Appendix includes the highest-leverage, most highly recommended support materials that are mentioned throughout the book. The accompanying CD-ROM provides those materials and others needed to deliver effective professional and leadership development on the topic of data-driven instruction. Please use anything and everything that is useful for your school.

Introduction

What Is This All About?

Rafael Munoz did not see a bright future in front of him during elementary school in Newark, New Jersey.1 He had been an undisciplined student who was suspended multiple times and fell just short on academic measures of proficiency. By his own admission, he was at risk of not graduating from high school. However, things turned around in middle school. Munoz made dramatic gains in achievement, scoring well above proficiency on state assessments and in the 90th percentile on a national norm-referenced assessment. Such remarkable gains merited an interview with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in June 2009. When Duncan asked him what was the difference, he responded:

“In elementary school, I didn’t know what I was doing. It didn’t seem to matter whether I came to school or not. I didn’t see the point, and I was frustrated trying to learn. When I changed to the middle school, however, teachers began working with me on my areas of weakness. They supported me in my learning, and I could see the direction of where I was headed. For the first time, I had a sense of purpose.”

Munoz’s experience is not an isolated one. He is one of a growing number of students nationwide who are benefiting from the successful implementation of best practices that increase student achievement. More specifically, he attended a school that had systematically implemented a data-driven instructional model to increase learning.

By now, the outlines of the story have been highlighted across the covers of education magazines nationwide: a school adopts a new model of instruction using data-driven methods and in a few short years achieves remarkable results. In this context, “data-driven instruction” has become one of the most widely discussed concepts in education. It has also been among the most misunderstood. For some, a data-driven school is simply one that conforms to the dictates of No Child Left Behind legislation. For others, it is any school in which assessments are used. More ominously, some consider data-driven schools to be those that ride roughshod over genuine learning in a mindless quest to “teach the test.” With so many conflicting definitions to choose from, it is often tempting for school leaders to adopt a this-too-shall-pass approach and avoid data altogether.

This would be a mistake. The proper use of data-centered methods in education isn’t an empty platitude and isn’t a matter of mindlessly teaching to the test—it’s a clearly defined and incredibly effective pathway to academic excellence. Rather than make vague assertions, Driven by Data lays out the specific measures needed to create a data-driven culture and, in doing so, achieve remarkable results. If this book is ambitious in its claims, it is because the facts are on its side. When correctly applied, data-driven instruction has led to dramatic gains in student performance nationwide.

Consider the North Star Academy and the Greater Newark Charter Schools, two public middle schools in Newark, New Jersey. The schools had much in common: both had randomly selected student populations drawn from Newark’s Central Ward, a neighborhood in which 90 percent of students qualify for free or reduced lunch and 85 percent are African American. Through diligent work, both schools created strong academic cultures in which students could thrive academically and behaviorally. Yet despite having fostered an effective environment for learning, both schools had been struggling to eliminate the achievement gap. At North Star, students outperformed the local district but tested below their suburban peers. At Greater Newark, the challenges of school start-up trumped rigor: in state math tests, only 7 percent of eighth-grade students achieved even basic proficiency.

Against this backdrop, both schools adopted the model of data-driven instruction outlined in this book. Figure 1.1 shows what happened next. Table 1.1 gives the numbers in detail.

In just four years, each school made tremendous gains in student achievement, outstripping the district average by at least thirty points on each assessment, and surpassing the statewide average in almost every category. These gains are not just number-crunching: they represent tens and hundreds of additional students reaching proficiency, which opens the doors for those students for future opportunities and creates far greater likelihood of success in college and life beyond.

Figure 1.1 Eighth-Grade New Jersey State Test Results: Percentage of General Education Students Proficient.

Table 1.1 Eighth-Grade New Jersey State Test Results (Detail)

Source: New Jersey School Report Cards, 2003-2006 for North Star Academy Charter School of Newark; 2004-2007 for Greater Newark Academy Charter School.

How did two schools with such different beginnings end up with such tremendous student achievement? They focused on the core drivers that matter, separating themselves from schools that didn’t.

While the narrative is compelling, it is not yet common. Unfortunately, for every school that succeeds with data-driven instruction, many more fall short and, despite years of intense effort, fail. Why?

This book is designed as a concrete, practical guide that answers that question, and by doing so it can lead schools to significant student achievement gains, creating more students like Rafael Munoz. To do that, three things are needed:

• A framework to guide your actions

• Proof that it works

• Concrete tools to put it into practice

This book provides all three. This introduction presents some of the general guidelines about the use of data-based methods, and Part One sets out the framework. Chapters One through Four each tackle one of the four critical drivers of school success. Chapter Five is then devoted to focused strategies for some of the more frequently encountered difficulties surrounding the implementation of data-driven instruction. If a single message unites the first part of this book, it is the profound importance of putting plans into practice: the subtlest analyses and most nuanced action reports are worthless if they do not lead to real change in the classroom.

Part Two of the book focuses on effective training in the framework of data-driven instruction. Although many factors shape a school’s ability to turn data-driven instruction from educational theory to concrete reality, none are as fundamentally important as effective leadership and teacher training. If school leaders and teachers are not taught how to use data in their schools and classrooms, then they—as too many before them—will fail. Chapter Six provides the pedagogical framework that was used in designing these adult learning activities. The Living the Learning model it describes is applicable to all sorts of professional development sessions, but here it is directly applied to the work of teaching adults about data-driven instruction. After establishing these basic guidelines, the remainder of the book contains extensive workshop materials for teaching data-driven instruction to leaders and teachers in a variety of contexts.

This book was not created in a theoretical laboratory; it comes from the experience of working with more than a thousand schools across the country. To illustrate its impact, I have highlighted a cross-section of twenty of those schools that have used our model to achieve impressive results. These schools come from every region of the country, from Oakland to Chicago to New York to New Orleans, and they range from district schools to charter schools, from schools who (before implementation) had only 7 percent of students proficient on state exams to schools who launched the framework from the first year of opening the school. They each journeyed upward on the ladder of student achievement, moving from poor results to good or from good to great. More than anything, they show that when a school makes student learning the ultimate test of teaching, teaching improves to produce better learning. Teaching and learning, then, walk hand in hand.

It is my hope that with the framework, training methods, and school success stories outlined in this book, school leaders will finally be able to receive and lead the comprehensive training they need to make data truly work for them.

THE FRAMEWORK: WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE DATA-DRIVEN?

Data-driven instruction is the philosophy that schools should constantly focus on one simple question: are our students learning? Using data-based methods, these schools break from the traditional emphasis on what teachers ostensibly taught in favor of a clear-eyed, fact-based focus on what students actually learned. In doing so, they create a powerful paradigm to drive academic excellence. Although each such school is unique, effective data-driven instruction is almost always premised on just a few fundamental building blocks, shown in the box.

Each of the four principles is fundamental to effective data-driven instruction, and the next four chapters will examine them in much greater detail. For now, though, another question is more pressing: With so few fundamental factors, why haven’t more schools succeeded? After all, almost every school in the country has assessments, does some sort of analysis, teaches (and thus acts), and has a culture.

The Four Key Principles

• Assessment: Create rigorous interim assessments that provide meaningful data.

• Analysis: Examine the results of assessments to identify the causes of both strengths and shortcomings.

• Action: Teach effectively what students most need to learn

• Culture: Create an environment in which data-driven instruction can survive and thrive.

The simple answer is that, in most cases, schools have made mistakes. On face, this statement isn’t terribly helpful; after all, every school makes at least some mistakes. When it comes to data-driven instruction, however, the type of mistake that a school makes goes a long way toward determining whether or not it will succeed.

THE EIGHT MISTAKES THAT MATTER

In general, the schools that implement data-driven instruction effectively are those that avoid a set of eight particularly perilous pitfalls:

• Inferior interim assessments

• Secretive interim assessments

• Infrequent assessments

• Curriculum-assessment disconnect

• Delayed results

• Separation of teaching and analysis

• Ineffective follow-up

• Not making time for data

Inferior Interim Assessments

Interim assessment of students is the lifeblood of data-driven instruction. Without well-thought-out and carefully written tests, effective analysis of student strengths and weaknesses is impossible. Unfortunately, many schools employ inferior interim assessments that suffer from serious shortcomings: they set bars that are too low, fail to align to end-goal tests, and neglect open-ended response sections. Effective data-driven instruction is impossible unless schools invest in creating or acquiring excellent interim assessments.

Inferior Assessments: A Tale of Caution

Before the advent of state testing at every level from third to eighth grade, most states only tested students in fourth and eighth grades. To bridge the gap and assess performance, one middle school chose to use a nationally normed standardized test in sixth and seventh grade to measure performance. The teachers prepared their students intensely to do well on that national assessment, and their students excelled, scoring over the 80th national percentile. Basking in their results, the school leaders were confident that the students would do equally well on the eighth-grade state test. They were quite shocked when the students performed notably worse, with only half of the students scoring proficient. What went wrong? The state test was far more rigorous and challenging than the nationally normed assessment: it required more writing, critical thinking, and sophisticated problem solving. No matter how hard the school had worked toward excelling on the nationally normed assessment, the bar was so low that students were not prepared to excel in a more challenging environment. Inferior assessments undermined their progress from the very beginning.

Data-Driven Success Story

Fort Worthington Elementary: Big on Building Rigor

The Results

Maryland State Assessment (MSA): Percentage at or Above Proficiency,Third Through Fifth Grade

Figure 1.2 Maryland State Assessment: Averages of Third Through Fifth Grades at Fort Worthington Elementary.

Met or exceeded statewide average at every grade level.

Eliminated the achievement gap for African American students.

The Story

When Shaylin Todd started at Fort Worthington Elementary School, teachers were not making an impact with the student body, which was 85 percent free or reduced lunch and 98 percent African American. Todd had attended all three data-driven workshops presented in this book prior to beginning the principalship (see Chapter Twelve and the Appendix), and she immediately began putting it all to work.

In the first year (2006-07), Todd focused on training her leadership team how to implement interim assessments and lead effective assessment analysis meetings every six weeks. She changed the instructional calendar to add more professional development time for teachers, which she used consistently to examine student data. She built a culture of public accountability: data boards were established throughout the building that included attendance data, SMART goals, interim assessment results, and student reading levels. She created professional learning communities devoted to looking at this data to determine what the teachers needed to do better on a daily basis. When teachers identified an area that was causing them difficulty as teachers (for example, teaching effective fluency techniques), Todd responded by offering professional development aimed at building capacity in those areas. Math saw dramatic gains in that year, yet reading improved more slowly.

In 2007-08, Todd and her leadership team took a closer look at their Open Court reading interim assessments, comparing them to the Maryland State Assessments (MSA). They noticed that the Open Court unit tests functioned primarily with literal comprehension questions, which matched the type of instruction that Todd was seeing in her teachers’ classrooms. Yet the MSA had significantly higher levels of critical and interpretive comprehension. So Todd led the leadership team to identify the areas that lacked sufficient rigor, and they charged the strongest teachers on each grade-level team to rewrite the questions to build up the rigor of the assessments. Todd then built an even more effective re-teaching plan: she used the Assessment Analysis Template (see the CD-ROM) to identify needs for whole-group instruction, small-group re-teaching, and individual support. Teachers added “MSA Vitamins” (mini-assessments) and a Saturday school for students who were right on the cusp of reaching proficiency. All the hard work at Fort Worthington Elementary paid off: scores skyrocketed, obliterating the achievement gap and setting new standards for achievement in Baltimore City.

Key Drivers from Fort Worthington Implementation Rubric

• Driving all aspects of implementation rubric: Todd focused on almost every component on the Data-Driven Implementation Rubric to drive the change in her school, launching culture and analysis in year one and more targeted assessments and action in year two.

• Leadership team: Todd and her leadership were completely aligned, and she trained all of them in leading effective analysis meetings.

• Aligned to state test rigor: Todd “beefed up” the rigor of the interim assessments by adding rigor associated with the state assessments.

Secretive Interim Assessments

If interim assessments drive rigor, then teachers and schools must know the end goal before they can work toward it. Unfortunately, most schools and districts prefer to be inflexible and secretive. They have many reasons for this approach. For one, it costs money to develop new assessments, so it’s easy to believe (questionably) that you cannot reuse an interim assessment if people can get a look at it and that it’s economically unviable to release interim assessments. Imagine setting off on a trip without a map; not revealing the interim assessments in advance is like getting a map after you’re already lost.

Infrequent Assessments

For interim assessments to work they need to be just that: interim. If students aren’t regularly assessed you have no way to track progress through the year and no way to identify problems in time to correct them. An assessment given once every three or four months cannot provide the data needed to make a difference.

Curriculum-Assessment Disconnect

It is tempting to view curriculum design as separate from interim assessment creation—but that’s an extremely dangerous move. This is one of the more common mistakes made in implementing data-driven instruction. If the curriculum scope and sequence do not precisely match the standards on the interim assessments, then teachers will be teaching one thing and assessing something else altogether. Then any assessment results gathered have no bearing on what actually happens in the classroom. Furthermore, if curriculum and assessment are disconnected, then teachers will (rightly) complain that the tests are unfair and that they should not be accountable for student performance, which will make the implementation of data-driven instruction all the more difficult.

Delayed Results

Even the most nuanced assessment is worthless if it isn’t graded and analyzed in a timely manner. The prompt scoring of results may seem to be a menial housekeeping task, but it is absolutely essential if schools are to make meaningful adjustments during the year. Every day that passes between the assessment and analysis of results is another day in which teachers present new material without correcting errors.

Separation of Teaching and Analysis

When implementing data-driven instruction, many schools leave the task of assessment analysis to school leaders on a data team. Although this strategy stems from a well-intentioned desire to let teachers teach, it invariably leads to failure. Data-driven instruction succeeds only when it is truly teacher-owned, meaning teachers must personally analyze their own classes’ data. Only when teachers feel that data-driven instruction is theirs will fundamental improvements begin to occur.

Ineffective Follow-Up

What happens after teachers have analyzed their results? In all too many school districts, the answer is a vague and nebulous commitment to take action that is generally ignored. This is a critical shortcoming. Districts and schools that do not create a clear, simple system to implement specific plans at a specific time won’t be able to make real change at the level of the classroom.

Not Making Time for Data

Finally, school calendars must reflect the reality of data-driven instruction by assigning structured, scheduled time for assessment, analysis, and follow-up. School years are busy, and if data-driven instruction is not explicitly embedded within the calendar it will be overlooked and ignored—and ineffective. The same is true for school leaders. Data-driven instruction will not be implemented effectively if the leaders do not embrace the process and make it a priority in their own scheduling. We must all practice what we preach!

ROADSIDE DISTRACTIONS: FALSE DRIVERS

Fortunately, although these mistakes can pose serious problems, none of them are unavoidable. By vigilantly guarding against these particular dangers, savvy school leaders can go a long way toward achieving success. Beyond the eight pitfalls, however, there is another, more subtle source of error in data-driven schools: focusing on false drivers.

As their name suggests, false drivers