Day Two (Surely I can come up with a better title!)

I started today unsure of what I might write about today but as luck would have it two subjects presented themselves, one at the beginning of the day and one at the end.

I have been reading an study called Achieving with Data: How High-performing School Systems Use Data to Improve Instruction for Elementary Students for the Assessment Group I belong to. I have set myself the task of writing notes for the rest of the group. I got chatting with our academic dean this morning about the notes to date and this post comes out of that.  

The study identifies 6 key strategies for success as noted in 4 school districts: 1. Building a foundation for data driven decision making; 2. Establishing a culture of data use and continuous improvement; 3. Investing in an information management system; 4. Selecting the right data; 5. Building school capacity for data-driven decision making; and finally, 6. Analysing and acting on data to improve performance .

From my reading I had come to the conclusion over the weekend that we were setting ourselves up for failure, or even more worrying yet, we were being set up for failure by our board. To be successful, we would need to have an information management system (which we don't at the moment and won't due to financial constraints) to assist us in analysing our data. Furthermore, we would need to be using the 'right' data. Unfortunately we have been required to take on board, as one of our assessment tools, MAP, which does not coincide with parts of our IB curriculum. This leads to two problems. Firstly, some teachers disregard the entire test because part of it is not relevant to our curriculum. If teachers don't believe in the validity of the test, they will never take the results seriously. Secondly, we lay ourselves open for the suggestion that we change our curriculum to align with the test. (It has also been suggested that we spend time teaching students to write the tests. We all know where that is going to lead!) Finally, we need to find the time to train teachers in analysing the data available to them about their students and then, teachers would need to find time in their schedules to work with the data. I don't know about other schools but at ours, teachers are already stretched to the limit. Furthermore, we have so many new initiatives each year that training time is at a premium.

The most worrying aspect of all, is that next year there is a plan afoot to judge teachers by student results. If our students are taking a test for which they are not prepared (due to the differences in curriculum), then it will appear that the teacher is failing to deliver the curriculum. Now, our administration knows the problems with the test but the other two schools in our group are using a curriculum which aligns more closely to MAP. When the board looks at the results across the three schools, they may perceive our school to be failing.