EDLL

One rarely reads a story or report on K-12 education these days without witnessing the invocation of student test data as evidence of the many ills in public education. Soon to follow is “data-driven decision-making” as a kind of “deus ex machina” brought in to resolve the thorny issues that apparently the actors failed to manage on their own. Our age is thoroughly saturated with data and testing, performance metrics and accountability algorithms. A decade ago, it was perhaps too easy to dismiss student achievement data and systematic research as having only limited practical use in evaluating the richly complex reality of schools. Today, broad claims for data-driven decision-making and research-based practice have moved us to the opposite extreme. Data now makes us very efficient observers of education. It saves a lot of thinking.

To address these problems in the overzealous appeal to data, however, it is first important to recognize how NCLB has moved the nation forward in its equity mission. In 2002, educators, civil rights advocates, business leaders, and teacher union leaders praised NCLB for its emphasis on improving education for all students, including those living in poverty, students of color, students with disabilities, and English language learners. There was bipartisan support for the law that seemed to transcend the politics of division for the sake of mobilizing the nation behind education reform. NCLB was created as a deliberate catalyst to compel states and school districts to embrace standards-based reform (SBR). For their record under the voluntary guidance of similar previous legislation, the Education Goals 2000 Act and 1994’s Improving America’s School Act (IASA), had been spotty, uneven and inconsistent. There were a few shining exceptions that pursued SBR creatively (e.g., Connecticut, Nebraska, and Kentucky). But clearly a voluntary national framework was not working. As the 18th century English moralist Samuel Johnson once said, “there is nothing like a hanging in a fortnight to concentrate the mind wondrously.” NCLB has definitely concentrated the mind wondrously!

The astonishing and historic achievement of NCLB is that it has clearly concentrated all minds on the moral imperative of equity and excellence in education. All states and local school districts, teachers, principals, and parents, and policymakers and other stakeholders in public education are aware of the NCLB goal of 100 percent proficiency in reading and mathematics by 2014. All understand the imperative of building the data infrastructure for SBR and the importance of using good data to analyze the performance of various groups of students by ethnicity, poverty, special education, and English language learners. These are real accomplishments. Further, by insisting that all students are entitled to “highly-qualified” teachers, the law has stimulated recruitment efforts in states where low-income and minority students have experienced a revolving door of inexperienced, untrained teachers. Because of NCLB, we now have a shared sense of direction and a common language that powerfully unite the country around the SBR revolution of high standards for every student. This changed mindset is genuine progress in preparing students for full participation in the political and economic life of an increasingly diverse and interdependent world. We cannot and should not turn back.

Yet the progress in education is still very slow. Fewer than 20 percent of U.S. eighth-graders are on track for college and many are unable to catch up during high school, according to a new ACT report based on 216,000 students who took precursors to the college-entrance exam in the eighth- and tenth-grades. "What we're saying is college and career readiness is a process that includes high school but is not exclusively a high school issue. It's a K-12 issue," said Cyndie Schmeiser, president of ACT's education division. Treating teachers, students, and schools as data points clearly isn’t working.

What is needed is the right balance of forces, a way of mobilizing the multiple perspectives on education across the many levels of decision-making involved in the education of children. As shown by international research as characteristic of the leading nations in student achievement, we should create a balanced accountability and assessment system. This more mature though common-sense use of data enables a creative tension between top-down use of statewide data to provide a “first glance” but limited look at school performance and the “bottom-up” use of student portfolios, rigorous course-taking, performance-based tests, and other evidence of student learning to complete a full portrait of school performance. In this way, we can restore human judgment and deliberative thoughtful decision-making to our understanding of the state of education and the progress yet to be made.