Data-driven To Distraction

This recent EdWeek editorial ("Data-driven to Distraction") by Andy Hargreaves has some great insights. Data-driven decision making remains essential to schools and school leadership. As a concept, however, it's quickly become incredibly misused and misunderstood. Hargreaves points that out nicely--I particularly like the like his quote that "teachers are no longer the drivers of reform, but the driven." Sadly, data has become an excuse not to think.

I see evidence of this all the time. There's the push to "analyze the data" just to find the areas that need improvement--often done using tests without discerning power between items or that measure multiple domains on items, and done in ways that involve looking a  charts and graphs without asking questions about what schools should do about them. Thanks for this dose of reality.