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=Data Teams Help District Close Achievement Gap= by Nancy Love and David Timbs (The Learning System, October 2008)

(This was notably an article that speaks to the value of: shared decision-making, the power of data driven decisions, the value of teachers receiving professional development on what data to gather and monitor, the value of data walls to engage dialog of achievement (students can and should use data to set personal goals and acknowledge achievements, data monitoring leads to sound goal setting, and most importantly; data decision systems know what learning the students have made and may need. there should be no surprises waiting for the PSSA results. Barbara H.

Data is definitely beneficial in making sound decisions. It is an important part of recognizing areas of need and showing progress. Another integral part is human interaction. I'd like to note that the data team members of Laurel Elementary School knew that the 4th grader's parents had separated and his grandmother had died. Computers can turn out tons of data and if we spend too much time analyzing and reflecting on it, we will lose touch with our students and our community. We need to stay balanced. Let's not get sucked into becoming a small part of a big system and instead be a big part of our students' lives. If our students aren't in class or if we lose our rapport with them, it really doesn't matter how data driven our instruction is. - Stephanie W.

I was very quick to point out that our school is much larger than the Johnson County schools, and like the vast majority of 90-90-90 schools we have heard so much about, the specific successes indicated were in the elementary grades. But that doesn't mean that we couldn't adopt similar approaches and even if we achieve a small portion of their success, we will still improve (at least 10%). I feel that we are on the right tract. We have a lot of data available and I think we are utilizing our collaboration times properly to standardize and identify successful practices among teachers as well as targeting student deficiencies, although we need to do a lot more of the latter. I have seen, even though on a small scale, progress with our interventions, but it is in that area that I feel we can have the most impact. We need to open it up to include more students and teachers. The paperwork required to track all students will be very daunting and cannot be overlooked or assumed that it will take care of itself, but hopefully we can include some time in our schedule next year, as we discussed earlier, to work with those identified students. Steve M.

I think data teams could be very helpful for the school district to pursue its policy of student achievement first. I agree with Steve in that the example school is very small compared to our school. But I still see the benefit from the article. Tim G