Not any more. "Data" now ranks with terms like "plague," "std," "HIV," etc. when I hear it.
In conversations eerily similar to these videos, first posted here by starry Messenger last week, my district is moving forward with the obsession with "data:"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVXhA_hs2J8http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8Mr-QUhZ9Ahttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAbEqIZ1baAThe background? in '08, we rolled out "data team leaders." They were classroom teachers on special assignment at the D.O. for the duration of the project, paid for by a grant. They each had 2 schools to work with. They showed up, the grant paid for subs for teachers to be pulled out of their classrooms to work as grade level teams to learn how to use data to inform instruction, because none of us had ever done such a shocking thing before. It was voluntary. I politely declined.
We also heard that the "proficiency based model" rolled out by our freshman team at the high school was highly successful, and that the district would be heading that direction. At the end of the year, I spent a week with a former teaching partner who left our school to become a "data team leader," and an administrator who is now our new superintendent, developing a blue-print for an online grade-book and reporting system, since it was determined that without an efficient, teacher-friendly way to keep track of and report student's "proficiency," teachers weren't going to buy in to the shift.
In '09, it was no longer voluntary. We had a "data team leader," now called an "instructional coach," assigned full time to our school. We had mandatory meetings every other week. In our K-8 school, there were teams of 1st-5th graders, because we've got 2 teachers at each grade level. I'm the only 6th - 8th teacher for my subjects. No team. So our math teacher traveled to meet with math teachers at another school and our science teacher and I formed a team focused on a social studies standard requiring analysis, which we could easily adapt to our different content areas. I did very little. The "instructional coach" showed up with an agenda, we let her walk through the meeting and keep all of the data. I let her write a "SMART" goal which I stuck onto my required professional development plan, because my district decided that all goals on those PDPs had to be "SMART" goals. I did not design instruction around anything we did in our meetings. Somehow, our students grew and our use of the data she gathered to "inform our instruction" was declared a success. Even though I didn't really do anything. I just taught the way I usually teach. Somehow, I knew that analyzing information was a skill that my students needed to improve on without designing a formative assessment or planning special lessons to focus on analysis, and somehow I still managed to teach them to do so within the context of what I was already doing.
In Sept. of '09 I heard that the blueprint we developed was a go, and that it would be ready and rolled out for our use by Sept. of '10. By March of '09, our superintendent resigned, followed by the resignation of a whole troop of people she brought with her, including the man who assured me that the blueprint was a "go." The superintendent, upon her resignation, signed on with Republican Chris Dudley's campaign governor. She was replaced by the previously mentioned admin.
Forward to this year. Our "Instructional coaches" are now split between 3 schools; the grant money is winding down. Since they won't be here to do everything for us, we are now given the responsibility for doing it ourselves, with no release time. The first thing? Someone from every grade level team at every school site has to agree to be the data team "leader," who will get some assistance from the "instructional coach," and who will earn a small stipend. My team of 3 teachers, (one each science, math, language arts,) sent the math teacher. He reluctantly volunteered. There was an immediate issue with our contract. No one from the 5th grade team volunteered. It's mandatory that one of them "volunteer," even though it's not a duty within our current contract, which expire this spring. Our principal, who recognizes the problem here, refused to "appoint" one of them, and took an avalanche of heat from the D.O. for doing so. Finally, a team of 4th/5th was created, allowing the 4th grade "volunteer" to serve both grade levels. Double duty, but no double stipend. Rumblings are heard all over the district about the forced "volunteering;" definitely a contractual storm on the horizon.
So...the "volunteers" write their sub plans and head off for their meeting. The next day, at our "data team meeting," our "instructional coach" lays out a new responsibility for every teacher: We will all choose 4 standards per trimester from our identified "priority standards" to focus on. We will "unwrap" those standards (decide how to assess and teach them.) We will do so on a standardized form that will go in the very large binder given to the new grade-level team "leaders" at their meeting the day before. Confusion reigns, because that wasn't listed among the long list of duties our "data teams" have this year, requiring the extremely large binder each team "leader" brought to the meeting. After 45 minutes, we understand that we are doing ALL of it, and that there are time deadlines attached. Things to have accomplished before the next data team meeting. My team? We teach 3 grade levels. Each of us is the only teacher for our subject. The bottom line? I have to produce, not 12 "unwrapped" standards, but 36 for Language Arts, since I teach 3 grade levels. My partners do the same for math and science. Then we work as a team to do the same for Social studies.
The rumblings are no longer underground; you can hear explosions happening around the district.
Finally, the 3rd shoe falls. We do 2 days of parent conferences every October, leaving us with 3 instructional days that week. We always open conferences on Wednesday after school through the evening, also, to accommodate working parents. Our conference schedule was set and parents were already signed up. In previous years, we would have had a teacher work day the Friday before conference week to prepare. Not this year; one of the days cut out of the calendar because of budget cuts. So conferences are scheduled and we have to prepare before and after school. A week before conference week, we are told that there is a 2-day literacy conference we are expected to attend on Monday and Tuesday of conference week. No information given other than that one statement. We object to our principal that yanking us out on conference week leaves us unprepared to meet with parents. He backs us and tells us not to go. We don't go. The district throws a fit. It was "mandatory." It was giving us information about extra duties that are mandated for the rest of the year. We don't have any of that information, and we've got work to complete and bring to the next mandated day out of our classrooms in December. Everyone at the trainings were required to sign a "memorandum of agreement" about all of those duties. We refuse to sign. The duties listed include things like submitting lesson plans, observing each other, video-taping each other, and...adding all of that work to the blessed "data" binder for our data team.
Our principal comes under heavy fire. We meet with him twice. Finally it is decided that we will meet with a district office supervisor to get the information we need to comply with the demands. We will comply. Our principal blatantly tells us to handle it however we see fit; that if the process is not useful, we can do the minimum necessary to get the district off our backs. We are setting up the meeting. We still aren't going to sign the "memorandum of agreement." We have our union president on that one.
What it will boil down to is this: We will have to write formal lesson plans based on one standard and observe each other teaching them. We will have to video-tape our meetings surrounding this process. We will pick a reading standard, as required. Our math teacher will write his own formal reading lesson plan, and not teach math for one period so that I can observe him teaching that reading standard. We will videotape our pre and post observation meetings, even though we don't have the equipment to do so. We will complete all the paperwork and put it in the binder.
Meanwhile, we will obviously not be actually planning effective lessons customized to our particular classes' and individual students' needs. We'll be too busy focusing on meeting deadlines for the binder, and worrying about a single standard that we must document the formal process: pre-assess, teach, and re-assess, and analyze results, and repeat.
This is "reform." And this is not an effective process for "using data to inform instruction."
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