Principle 12: Remove barriers that rob educators and students of their right to joy in work and learning. This means, inter alia, working to abolish the system of grading student performance, the annual or merit rating of staff, and the Management by Objective of schools and school systems. The responsibility of all educational leaders must change from sheer numbers to quality.
Read MoreJanuary is a popular month to set new goals, so I decided to kick-off this year with a four-part series on this very topic. In Part I of the series, I proposed four conditions that organizations should understand prior to setting a goal.
Organizations should understand the capability of the system or process under study.
Organizations should understand variation within the system or process under study.
Organizations should understand if the system or process under study is stable.
Organizations should have a logical answer to the question, “By what method?”
Absent an understanding of these conditions, goals are too often “arbitrary and capricious.”
Last month, I discussed a powerful tool, the process behavior chart, that can be used to filter the noise out of our data. The whole point of this series has been to think through how to properly interpret and react to data, which includes the filtering process. Unfortunately, much of what happens on the data analysis front in the education sector is akin to writing fiction. Writing fiction will be the main topic of this post.
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School and district report cards were released in mid-September to little fanfare because they lacked state test scores. These scores form the heart of the report cards, but were missing from this year’s reports because the coronavirus pandemic shut down schools and prevented spring testing. Maybe this year provides an opportunity to stop and think about a couple of questions related to the report cards. Questions such as, what do the report cards tell us about schools? And, should we be rating and ranking schools?
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