Superintendents and school boards, regarding how well children are achieving in your schools today, you are as fully clothed as the undressed emperor who walked down the village street in his skivvies believing that he was regally garbed. (Read The Emperor’s New Clothes by Hans Christian Anderson to refresh the image.)
The terms and reality of “informational transparency” are applied to almost all school data today. The public has relatively easy access to the educational performance of the school district as a whole as well as each school individually. The informational display of achievements of children at specified grade levels focuses the expose’ from district to school to the classroom and even to clusters of teachers. If a school district has a small enrollment, transparency can be an expose’ of each teacher’s instructional effectiveness.
Is this new? You bet it is. For decades, too many decades in fact, the work of effective teachers masked the ineffective instruction of other teachers whose employment was maintained because the poorly performing teacher coached a sport or directed a play or was a favorite friend of children and parents. Or, the status quo was maintained because the legal system and union contracts made disciplining an ineffective teacher a monumental ordeal. Just as the emperor had a very sobering moment when he learned that he was not clothed, school leaders are having sobering moments as they learn that disaggregated data strips the luster from what was believed to be a school district or school where all children were successful learners.
School data transparency starts with public access to school information. In Wisconsin, transparency is accessed through the Department of Public Instruction’s new public portal. This web site (http://wisedash.dpi.wi.gov/Dashboard/portalHome.jsp) opens WISEdash, the new Data Dashboard for driving through the layers of information. Data can be “mined” to understand the performance of children in each school within a school district and to compare performances school to school and school district to school district.
“So?” may be the response of yesterday’s educational leader. Today’s leader understands that in the era of accountability, low performance indicators must be investigated and strategies must be found to improve those performances. Interestingly, low reading scores in 3rd grade usually have two dimensions. There is a need to improve instruction in Kindergarten, first and/or second grade. There also is a need to remediate reading abilities of children in third and fourth grade.
Once upon a time, causation for low performance scores was attached to individual students or a group of students in a grade level and shrugged off year after year until those children graduated or left the school(s). Accountability today has no shrugs.
If school was professional baseball and the shortstop made chronic fielding errors, a general manager would schedule a lot of extra fielding practice until the shortstop became “sure gloved.” If the shortstop could not stop bobbling the ball, the GM would look for a new shortstop, because the team’s overall performance cannot abide the chronic errors of a regular player. In school, the education of children cannot abide the chronic ineffective instruction of a teacher for a full school year. High performing school districts and schools are the result of all teachers providing effective instruction that causes all children to learn successfully.