#data driven education

Today we had a follow-up meeting about data teams. We each had to come up with a pre-assessment to assess our standard, and then we combined it into one quality assessment.

I actually took mine seriously. I’m in a weird space where I’m tired of feeling cynical and defeated in teaching, so I thought I’d give drinking the Kool Aid a try. I must say, my pre-assessment was totally dope. It was baller.

However, before our meeting started, I brought something up with our facilitator. I made sure to do this before anyone else got there so they wouldn’t feel put on the spot. But I pointed out that it took me about an hour just to make one assessment that measures only one standard. We’re going to have at least three assessments, possibly more if we follow the model. And then there’s the time taken to give the assessment, grade the assessment, sort the assessment data into something meaningful, then have conversations/make decisions based on this data. So my question was whether there are other schools that are further in the process and if they had ways of making this whole thing more efficient.

And the answer I got was that we only do this with “priority standards,” and then a bunch of stuff that didn’t really address my question or help me implement this in my actual classroom a meaningful way.

sigh

This is my sixth year of teaching, and data team stuff has been sold to me this whole time. And I honestly, truly give it a try, but the whole process is incredibly time consuming and relies on everything working perfectly and smoothly—which, as you know, is rarely how this teaching gig actually works. As a result, something always falls apart on me (it takes too long to gather assessments, we take too long to make a decision) and the whole thing falls by the wayside.

It’s just frustrating because I am trying to be on the team, but nobody is telling me how to play the game. They are just giving me plays, and they sound good on paper, but I have no idea how to actually implement them into reality.

I’m trying to do these initiatives that most of the staff thinks are a waste of time, but I am actually trying to give them a chance, but no one is acknowledging my legit concern that I don’t know how to make this work in practice.

Okay. Here’s the much more negative and cynical part of what came out of today’s meeting which I wrote about earlier.

Do we even understand how research and data work?

Part of our data-team process, and the part that my group openly rejected, was that we should agree on a common teaching strategy so that our post-assessment would measure its effectiveness.

What’s the point of the common teaching strategy? I get that the idea is to figure out stuff that works, but you have not isolated the variable even a little bit to determine that the teaching strategy was the reason for student gains.

Let’s say we all agree to do, I dunno, Cornell notes because note-taking is a Marzano strategy with a percentile gain of 34. Fine. My fellow teachers and I have completely different personalities and completely different students with completely different classroom compositions and skill levels and will be scaffolding things completely differently, so you’re not actually measuring whether or not Cornell notes work. Also, it’s entirely possible that what I can do with cooperative learning, the teacher down the hall can do with a read-lecture-reflect model.

I know this is something hard to grasp when you look into a classroom and merely see data points, but people--teachers and students included--are actually widely variable. 

This is one of those things that totally breaks me, because it hits on three obnoxious things at once:

The idea that education can be homogenized, becoming a fine-tuned assembly line where the parts are easily interchangeable

The implication is that teachers don't know what they're doing and need to prove it

This morning our Language Arts 10 department met with an administrator to guide our progress on data teams.

 I feel like I preface every conversation I have about education policy with this, but—there is a lot to be cynical about in education. I don’t think it’s conspiracy-theory talk to speak of the backdoor privatization of public education and the intentional slow dismantling of public education over the last twenty years.

However, nearly all of my one-on-one interactions with people, even people who are peddling things that are systemic of the problems in education, nearly all of these interactions feel like we have the best of intentions.

And here’s kind of the thing—when we talk about data teams, it makes sense. I want to be on board even if I'm not.

I fully get identifying a clear goal or standard, measuring it, remeasuring it, comparing this with the other teachers doing the same things. I am willing to drink this Kool-Aid because you’re right—decisions based on research and data are better. We shouldn’t just “feel” this is the right course. We should know.

It’s just—when do I have time to do this?  What should I give up to make time for this?

And the answer is always some variation of, “Well, this will only take about two minutes of your class.” Sure. But there are several other educational reforms and initiatives that will "only take two minutes of my class.” This stuff adds up, y’all.

Setting all cynicism aside, so many of the reforms and initiatives we do in education are myopic, things that are awesome in theory, but they completely ignore the reality of situations. Sometimes realistic is better than idealistic. And realistically, we can’t do everything. I wish we could. But that isn’t how things work.

I did some really haphazard research on data-driven education, the kind of research I would give my kids a D for doing (I Googled it for about twenty minutes between games of WWE 2k14). However, what I tended to find wasn’t research showing data-driven education worked or examples of schools who have been hugely successful with it. What I found was an analogy that companies like Google take all kinds of data from their users to fine-tune the experience and provide amazing customer service.

And that sounds great! Yeah, education should do something like that! Fine-tune the educational experience for each individual student! We should provide amazing "customer service"!

But, dude, my classroom and my school do not have the resources that Google does.