Putting Data On The Wall At Hearst

What would you do if your principal put up the results from Learning First and the Math Benchmark outside your classroom, or had you look at data to find spikes and gaps that might help you teach differently?  The story that jumps out at me from this month's Catalyst is this one about Hearst elementary:  "How one Southwest Side school built a [controversial] data wall, lost half its teachers and is leading the charge to use data-driven instruction." Click on the link to learn more about Principal Miller and decide for yourself whether this approach being used at Hearst and other parts of the city is worthwhile or too much.

 

Comments

[George Schmidt]

"...Focusing on students’ performance data helps teachers be lifelong learners, says Miller. “But there’s a risk. You have to be working with people you trust because you’re going to be putting out your dirty laundry.”

"His willingness to post classroom-level data so openly may be unique in Chicago Public Schools, perhaps even detrimental to staff morale, but it ultimately reflects CPS objectives to push schools to use data to improve instruction..." (Catalyst)

This whole article is a real set piece of teacher bashing.

Catalyst has outdone itself in following the party line of its corporate masters on this one. Just about every quote is from the DATA FREAKS with absolutely no credence given to the classroom teachers who looked at this nutsy approach to an elementary school and said "Enough."

To use a word like "transparency" to describe the posting of test score data for classrooms and teachers is to make an even bigger Orwellian hash of language than is usual in CPS. But that, too, it typical Catalyst at this point.

Here is my offer: If any (or all) of the teachers who left Hearst wants, I'll publish their side of the story, verbatim and without editing.

Meanwhile, part of the job of sanity in the face of these stupidities is to out guys like Miller for the crazies they are.

Now to land one last time on reality.

The fastest way to goose up your "data" is to eliminate the "worst" kids. At the whole school level, that's now called the "King High School Model" in Chicago. Locally at a school, it's to leave the lowest kids out (or out of the teaching loop until the last teacher arrives, too late to complain) and then dump all the "bad" kids in one room. Even eliminating one "bad kid" can make a statistically significant change in the "data" when data in this sense are driving such management praxises.

With a closer look, I'm confident that's precisely what's been going on at Hearst.

One other thing. As any serious researcher will tell you, any data coming out of Hearst (such as a one-year pop) is meaningless. Between three and five years will give people some ideas of how the patterns are really developing. And with those data abstracts a curious person would also have to know what underlies the data (including the number of students dumped in order to goose up one year-to-year data set).

That makes the stories (plural) much more complex that quoting a bunch of talking heads, all of whom are saying the same thing and pointing the narrative in the same direction. But after all, that's the Catalyst reportorial model, and has been for years.

Back in the older days, I once tracked the Catalyst quotes on controversial programs -- name it, from Reconstitution to Intervention and beyond. There were always a handful of quotes from "teachers" and administrators praising the flavor of the month reform. Then, instead of quoting (on or off the record) actual teachers who were skeptical, Catalyst went into quoting a bunch of experts who shared only three or four things. One, they were "experts" (although how and why was not states). Two, they were usually on the Board's payrool (directly or indirectly, like the "external partners" during that scam). And, three, their quotes always supported the latest Board fashion out of historical context.

As in: This one will work for sure.

The funniest were the energetic reports on "Intervention" back in 2000. Of course, when Intervention crashed and CPS moved to the next nonsense, those facts were ignored. (Just as the history of Joann Roberts was).

Of course, that wouldn't be of interest to Catalyst, since their grants and funding depend on their morphing with each fashion on the road of corporate "school reform."

[Please George]

George,
Too bad you don't just update your own blog and stop trying to ride Russo's like a circus pony. Could you be any more self-righteous and boring? Please.

[cermak_rd]

All quotes taken from article:

"The thing that we’ve found most powerful is just looking at the actual student work produced every day." I'm no expert on pedagogy but isn't this what teacher's have always done?

"Eventually, the Boston schools that Harvard worked with found opportunities for teachers to visit classrooms and watch one another teach. That helped teachers reflect deeply on their own instruction, Boudett says, and it put a second set of eyes into classrooms during group activities." Umm, mentoring and giving critique? Is this really new?

"Surprising trends lurked in that data, too, including a huge spike in referrals just after lunch. Though teachers knew discipline issues were greatest at that time, they had never seen the problem’s true magnitude--until Baccellieri’s charts surfaced. Teachers clamped down and referrals fell dramatically." Clamped down or stopped referring under orders?

"'In the end, what’s really critical is to help teachers understand what’s important for 8th-graders to know and do, so they can move on and get a 20 or better on the ACT,' he says." So that's why society bothers with the whole formal education thing, so the students can get a 20 on their ACT? Not so they can fit into a democratic society? Not so they can think critically? Not so they can fulfill their potential, whatever it is? Not so they can be inspired to reach higher? I have my doubts.

" 'The thing that we’ve found most powerful is just looking at the actual student work produced every day." I'm no expert on pedagogy but isn't this what teacher's have always done?' "

Absolutley. I'm all for test data, but focusing too much on it actually removes you too far from the student work. I can gain a much better understanding looking at their actual work, as opposed to a breakdown of which test questions they missed.

[SmashedFace]

I agree with 4:43 that there are many types of data one can look at. Looking only at the testing results...and posting only that sends one very clear message: Teach to the Test.

In the high school profiles, there are questions about whether students feel work is challenging, about whether students feel supported by teachers. This is all valuable data.

Similarly, a principal who posts that should feel comfortable having data about him posted in the school. How to teachers feel supported by him? Are they happy with his use of data to drive decisions? Does he choose the right data?

There is a great deal of important data to use. Don't limit it. Use it all and make sure that the principal has the wall for himself, too.

Some of the people that posted should do some serious research on what data driven decision making actually entails. Schools district across the country that are making AYP has moved to data driven decision making. There are three basic skills (construct factual meaning, construct inferential meaning and construct evaluative meaning) and 7 sub-skills tested in standardized test. Ypou have to analyze the test data to determine what area(s) the students are weak in, then you design instruction accordingly. Using intuition will not accomplish the job.

[SmashedFace]

2:34,
Do you really believe that test data is the only piece we should use?

Having sat through numerous "data driven decision making" workshops, no one has any clear idea of what data should be looked at. Some of those workshops have focused on attendance; some have focused the test data you use; some have used quantitative data from parent surveys, teacher surveys, student surveys, etc.

Data means different things to different people.

For example, (and, yes, I know I've used this before), if high school GPA is a greater indictor of success in college than standardized test scores, why is all of our emphasis there?

If I wanted to travel to a destination I was not sure of, I wouod use mapquest or some other direction finder. I could also use on-star. The standardized test acts as the direction finder. My post listed the three basic skills and seven sub-skills students are tested in. An example of one basic skill and its sub-skills - Construct Inferential meaning (skill) (sub-skills) draw conclusion, apply information, and traits, feelings and motives. You have to analyze the data to determine oif the student(s) are weak in all 3 sub-skills, 2 or none. If it is concluded the majority of the class is weak in drawing conclusions that has to be a instructional focus.

[Progressive teaccher]

I like the areas they show us doing poorly in, based on two question on the test. lol

Triangulated observations are a valid form of scientific data. Quantitative data from standardized test scores gives a limited view from a particular moment in time (test day). We have completely eliminated qualitative evaluation from our assessments. Who makes these ridiculous decisions?

[George Schmidt]

"...For example, (and, yes, I know I've used this before), if high school GPA is a greater indictor of success in college than standardized test scores, why is all of our emphasis there?.."

Not only is high school GPA (because it measures work), but also SES of the family.

Actually, the so-called "standardized" test data being used in Chicago are worse than nothing, because they give comfort in numbers that are either meaningless or dangerously misleading.

Numerofreeaks then fill walls with these scribblings and use them to bully teachers, who might want better, into silence or bad praxis. That's what the Hearst School hagiograph and that silly story are rooted in. It's sadly typical of the kind of "journalism" practiced in Chicago today. Paid by the piper, they play his tunes.

The best stuff on the limitations of so-called "standardized" tests is still deep on the Fair Test website (www.fairtest.org) and in the writings of numerous researchers, all among the top people (Walt Haney; Angela Valenzuela; Richard Rothstein; Gerald Bracey; Susan Ohanian; David Berliner; and others). There is actually no serious scholarly debate on the severe limitations of so-called "standardized" tests. What's at issue today is whether the political monstrosities that created "data driven" (i.e., standardized test data) schooling can be overcome, just as the lies of "Weapons of Mass Destruction" have had to be debunked, even thought the war they wrought has yet to be ended.

The most important correlation on all so-called "standardized" tests is family income. Please don't tell me the outliers mean anything statistically significant; next thing you'll be quoting Clarence Thomas on oppression.

The next correlation is to white + economic class, because test items are "normed" based on that normative group (that's basic psychometrics; and the norming group is white and middle class). That's one of the most important reasons why every test has to be outed once it's given. The test items (and their weighting) matter enormously. And if you believe that they have been vetted for populations like the children at Hearst (or in any CHA project), I'll write a test for you that those children will pass that just about every teacher will fail. Trouble is, this is no longer a game because the world is being populated by powerful idiots who fill the walls with meaningless "data" in a "data driven" world of cliche and dumb.

The damage to pedagogy and to children will be felt into surviving generations.

We can do a great deal to innoculate the children as parents, but less powerful parents are more dependent on school.

Take "Multiple Choice Math" and what it results in.

One of my biggest worries -- having had a child survive Chicago's data driven monstrosities througout the 1990s -- was that the child would succumb to the manias and mantras. The specific thing I would try to innoculate him against was what I called "multiple choice math". That form of math actually cripples the "best" students over time (by age 12 o3 13, with finality) because it trains them in the opposite of doing real math. Instead of confronting problems and solving them the child is trained to outguess the test makers, always assuming that reality is spread from "A" through "D" or "E" on a controlled answer sheet.

As a result of this horror, Chicago has produced a generation of "superior" math students who crash and die against the real math challenges that can come up in challenging high school courses (statistics and calculus being the best, because they are both independently evaluated).

What should be someone's PhD study is how many relatively high scoring 9th graders are driven out of math in high school because (a) they have been lied to about their math abilities because of multiple choice testing and (b) their expectations are dashed when they come up agaist serious math by high school? Instead, what's likely in Chicago is that my almat mater will continue to award advanced degrees for deliberately mendacious studies that reenforce existing prejudices. The University of Chicago is world famous for this kind of dishonesty, so it's only locally that we're major prey for such experts.

This is no joke.

Chicago has now been in the forefront of these data driven idiocies for 12 years. It doesn't matter that our mayor and schools CEO can't explain the most basic psychometric realities. All they have to do is read those carefully prepared scripts from their overpaid corporate PR people.

But at some point, there will be a reckoning. There already has been for many Chicago children who blanked out in the face of real math by 9th or 10th grade. That's when it became tragically clear they had learned how to master multiple choice tests but couldn't even learn to do math.

Crippling a generation of the kids who worked the hardest to do well is unforgivable. But I have a hunch that anyone dumb enough to plaster a school's walls with ISAT scores probably doesn't know the first thing about statistics, data, or testing. So what's the point of debating such fools?

Exactly, George! Sad, isn't it?

Are other principals requiring that teachers post their students' ISAT scores?