At Your Fingertips: Using Everyday Data to Improve Schools - Softcover

Rossi, Kristi; Bradby, Denise; Teitelbau, Peter; Mpr Associates

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0966288300 ISBN 13: 9780966288308

Publisher: M P R Associates Inc, 1998

Synopsis

At Your Fingertips is a practical step-by-step guide to selecting, analyzing and reporting critical information in an easy-to-understand and compelling manner. With authentic examples, crisp instructions, clear language and straightforward worksheets, this workbook will lead you through a highly effective process to build a home grown performance indicator system consistent with your school's core goals.

Drawing on their work with schools across the country, Karen Levesque and her colleagues at MPR Associates, with support from the National Center for Research in Vocational Education, have created a book that provides school people with a means to systematically marshal valid, reliable and trustworthy data to communicate more effectively with parents, school boards and state officials. As schools seek to improve the quality of education they provide, At Your Fingertips promises to uncover problems before they become deep seated and to recognize accomplishments that deserve to be celebrated and emulated.

About this title

About the Author

Karen Levesque is a senior research associate at MPR Associates where she directs a broad range of data analysis studies for the National Center for Education Statistics. A graduate of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, she has extensive experience conducting research and policy studies about education practices and the use of data in both secondary schools and institutions of higher education. Recently, Ms. Levesque participated in a study that examined the preliminary effects of performance measures and standards at the state and local level and found that although the states generally responded enthusiastically to developing performance measurement systems, this enthusiasm rarely translated into local use of data. In part, as a result of this investigation, Ms. Levesque assembled a team of MPR researchers to develop a workbook for schools on using data for continuous improvement - At Your Fingertips: Using Everyday Data to Improve Schools.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Preface

Educating our children is one of the most human and most familiar activities that we as a society undertake. Yet, it remains one of our least well-understood enterprises. While much has been learned about what works in schools and what does not-that is, what exemplary practices look like and what constitutes damaging practice-many of our most accomplished teachers are often surprised about the wide range in the levels of competency among their students. With cognitive research just beginning to provide us with a window on how the young and the old learn, we do not have all the answers about how to run a first-rate school or how to help all students reach their potential.

Teaching and learning remain a mixture of art and science, of trial and error, and, when executed well, of gradually improving and perfecting one's practice as well as the curriculum and culture of the school. There are no cookbook recipes on the shelf that can be applied to assure that the result will be satisfactory in the wide variety of contexts that characterize American education today.

Given this situation, it is not surprising that educators do not usually rush to quantify the critical aspects of schooling, nor do they particularly trust those who do or the results of their efforts. This suspicion is natural, given the issues under consideration and is probably quite healthy, as education data often provide a patina of certainty that is not well deserved. However, being blind to the underlying truths that often exist in quantitative measures is shortsighted. In fact, precisely because the mysteries, charms, and beauty of education often mask what is happening and why particular results occur, be they positive or negative, quantitative analyses can be a powerful tool. If applied well, such analytical work can uncover what is occurring beneath the surface in our schools. It can alert us to unexpected triumphs and to unforeseen problems. It can tell us if new initiatives are having their desired effects, are provoking a set of unintended consequences, or both. We can learn if implementation of promising ideas is proceeding as planned or is being compromised by unexpected changes in the school district. And, as we seek to educate our children in a manner that emphasizes both excellence and equity, we can develop measures that assure we do no harm.

The development of At Your Fingertips was grounded in these beliefs-that well-organized quantitative knowledge about how schools operate and what students know and are able to do can be extraordinarily powerful. At a time when it is popular to distrust data, to take the position that statistics can be made to support any stance, the authors of this workbook believe that ignoring the hard reality that education statistics often present does a tremendous disservice to our children and our communities. At a time when education is widely understood to be the key to a healthy and prosperous future, those who lead our schools, who are responsible for educating the nation's youth, and the public at large, need the best tools available to gauge accurately how well schools are functioning and how well our children are learning. Consequently, At Your Fingertips is designed to help school people systematically marshal valid, reliable, and trustworthy data in a manner that will allow them to think clearly about how they might most effectively dedicate their knowledge, skills, and energies to the common purposes and responsibilities they share for educating the nation's youth.

At Your Fingertips does not assume that a particular pedagogical approach that is working well for a school in Chicago is going to be the best approach in Little Rock, or that organizational arrangements that appear highly effective in Tucson will translate well to those in Baltimore, although they well might. What it does assume is that professionals who work in our schools have a common interest in seeing that all students succeed, and that committed professionals working together can both devise sound instructional approaches that fit well with the traditions, history, culture, and demographics of the school; with the knowledge and skills of the student body; and with the faculty's own goals, values, talents, and beliefs; and, concurrently, design performance measurement systems that are compatible with these perspectives. At Your Fingertips is also built on the presumption that much of the data needed to make this happen already reside nearby in school and district offices, in teachers' own records, and in readily accessible public data banks. Not infrequently, such resources are overlooked and undervalued because they have been created to satisfy someone else's agenda. Schools regularly receive orders to produce what seem like great mounds of data, be it in the form of student tests or attendance records or budgets. However, while school people left to their own devices might not choose to devote their scarce time to such pursuits, this information, when organized well and joined with other useful data, can often be turned to the school's advantage.

At Your Fingertips seeks to do just this. We think it can achieve this result-first, by providing an orderly process for considering the various factors that can contribute to a powerful performance measurement system, and second, by sharing our knowledge about the core characteristics of a sound system and a set of promising approaches to data analysis that can "bring statistics to life" and help both educators and the general public have a richer appreciation of how well schools are satisfying their missions. The news will not always be good, but bad news is better than ignorance.

A school that is willing to examine itself critically is one that will increase the odds that its students will succeed. Such a school will also find that it has a new and effective means to communicate in a very powerful way with its parents, others in the system, and the community at large. In fact, just sharing information about how the school is functioning is such an unusual act that it will often yield a measure of good will that is invaluable to efforts to test new curricular and instructional approaches. Internally, the availability of such information can lead to a new and healthy conversation among the faculty-one that promotes reflection on practice, healthy skepticism about trendy ideas, and a school culture that values professional knowledge and expertise and finds ways to channel and use it to yield the greatest good for the greatest number.

At Your Fingertips has been created to support grass roots, bottom-up education improvement strategies that depend on the initiative, commitment, and energy of front-line professionals. It is up to the users to decide what is important, what are their school's highest priorities, and how much time can be allocated to building a meaningful system. While top-down reforms can be effective, by themselves they are unlikely to be a sufficient response to the demands for excellence and equity the nation faces today. Because well-intentioned state and national efforts to hold students to high standards need to be complemented by a host of ongoing local actions, finding ways to encourage, support, and reward home-grown local school improvement initiatives is crucial. At Your Fingertips can contribute to such efforts since it assists in the planning and monitoring of significant departures from the status quo. Taking calculated risks in the interest of children has typically not been encouraged in American schools, while playing it safe has been. If this publication can play a role in righting this balance, its authors will know their time has been well spent.

Today, our schools face the toughest of challenges-providing a quality education not only for an elite few but also for the entire student body. Such an education should prepare young people to participate fully in our democratic institutions and to live productive and rewarding lives in a world where science and technology play increasingly dominant roles. To meet this challenge head-on, schools cannot sit back and coast. We hope that At Your Fingertips will reward those educators who are committed to building better futures for the youngsters in their charge by providing them with a means to better govern their professional lives.

Gary Hoachlander President MPR Associates, Inc. David R. Mandel Director MPR Center for Curriculum and Professional Development Berkeley, California March 1998

Edition details

• Publisher: M P R Associates Inc
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0966288300
• ISBN 13: 9780966288308
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 250
• Editor: Levesque Karen