Leading with Data: Pathways to Improve Your School

"Goldring and Berends provide practical and strategic counsel on what data should be collected, how data can be productively analyzed, and who should be involved. Their book positions this advice deftly in research on leadership and organizational change. As school leaders confront the challenges of meeting the needs of all students through continuous school improvement, they will find this book an essential resource."
―Willis D. Hawley, Professor of Education and Public Policy
University of Maryland

A comprehensive, practical guide to using data effectively for school improvement!

For any educator focused on enhancing student outcomes and schoolwide performance results, knowing how to collect appropriate data isn′t necessarily enough. Understanding how to analyze and use data as a pathway to improvement is the key.

This comprehensive, hands-on guidebook discusses the essential statistical and assessment information that principals need to know, what types of data to look at, how to analyze the information, and how to use what they′ve learned to make critical choices for teaching and learning.

Full of examples and recommendations, this book illustrates proactive strategies for collecting data and generating change while focusing on other measures of learning and school organization, including data about professional development, allocation of resources, family involvement, and community standards. Part of the Leadership for Learning series, this resource:

• Provides leaders with support in developing and sustaining schoolwide capacity for continuous improvement
• Links data-based decision making with accountability issues and shared mission and goals
• Includes numerous examples and cases, a glossary, school improvement template, sample forms, and data tools

Leading With Data demonstrates how administrators can apply knowledgeable analysis of meaningful data for continuous, sustainable, and significant school improvement.

Ellen B. Goldring is professor of education policy and leadership at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University, where she won the Alexander Heard Distinguished Professor award. Her areas of expertise and research focus on improving schools, with particular attention to educational leadership and access and equity in schools of choice. She is the immediate past coeditor of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. She serves on numerous editorial boards, technical panels, and policy forums, and is the coauthor of three books, including Principals of Dynamic Schools (Corwin Press), as well as hundreds of book chapters and articles. Goldring is currently working on a project funded by the Wallace Foundation to develop and field-test an education leadership assessment system and establish its psychometric properties. She is also conducting experiments to study professional development and performance feedback for school leaders. She is an investigator at the National Center on School Choice and the Learning Sciences Institute at Vanderbilt. Goldring received her PhD from the University of Chicago.

Mark Berends is the Hackett Family Director of the Institute for Educational Initiatives at the University of Notre Dame. He is also a professor of sociology and directs the Center for Research on Educational Opportunity (CREO). He has written and published extensively on educational reform, school choice, the effects of family and school changes on student achievement trends and gaps, and the effects of schools and classrooms on student outcomes. His research focuses on how school organization and classroom instruction are related to student development, with special attention to underserved students and school reforms aimed at reducing educational inequalities. Within this agenda, he has applied a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods to understanding the effects of school reforms on students, teachers, and schools.