Mapping the Route to Educational Excellence
by Phil Quigley, President & CEO, Pacific Telesis Group
By now, the pattern is familiar: Schools announce major improvement plans
with great enthusiasm and commitment from administrators, staff and parents.
But frustrations begin to surface when the school community cannot see immediate
improvements in student achievement. Test scores are often the only tangible
indicators of whether the school's improvement process is making a difference.
But test scores are rarely available on a timely basis, and they do not
tell the whole story. As part of a school-improvement process, other sources
of student-learning data, demographics, finances, teaching strategy and
ongoing continuous-improvement data need to be made available to and utilized
by our schools.
While working with schools during the past seven years, the Pacific Bell
Foundation has been troubled by the dearth of usable data available to schools.
It is alarming to see how infrequently, if ever, schools rely on formal
data for needs assessment and decision making regarding children's education.
Data is neither used to understand the impact of current processes nor why
students are not learning.
There are various reasons explaining each school's inability or unwillingness
to use existing data, ranging from outdated computer systems to a lack of
trained personnel. Each obstacle is surmountable if we all agree to replace
hunches and hypotheses with data-driven decisions, empowering our educational
leaders to create the very best learning environments possible.
The Pacific Bell Foundation's Education for the Future Initiative is working
closely with the California Department of Education, the WestEd Comprehensive
Assistance Center, schools and school districts throughout California to
build comprehensive and easy-to-use databases that will help schools establish
a strong reliance on data-for our children's benefit.
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