John Thompson: How do you really know if data-driven policies and outcomes are accurate?
John Thompson is a former Oklahoma City school teacher, and he has some doubts about the magical world of data-driven policies. There have been reports that Oklahoma city schools have been improving, and that’s okay news, but enrollment is still dropping, and state education chief Ryan Walters is still pushing terrible policies.
I prefer to focus on the school system’s culture, not individuals, which is good because I no longer have the close relationships with administrators, teachers and students that I used to have. But, nearly four decades of teaching, collaborating with the district and with education researchers have taught me two relevant lessons. First, data-driven, as opposed to data-informed, policies have been disastrous. Secondly, administrators have been pressured to continually claim to be data-driven.
I understand why Oklahoma City Public Schools didn’t push back against Walters’ doomed-to-fail administration mandates, but I worry about its response, the “OKCPS welcomes accountability that supports successful outcomes for students and will take full advantage of the support being provided by OSDE.”
I don’t expect any OKCPS superintendent to go on record the way that Bixby Superintendent Rob Miller did when explaining why Oklahoma’s A-F school grading system is one of reformers’ “zombie ideas,” which for two decades have been “public-relations rhetoric,” as opposed to a policy for improving education. But I hope administrators will remember the research Miller draws upon as to how and why: “Standardized tests are unreliable indicators of school quality,” that tend to “subject kids — usually poor and minority students — to these tedious, time-wasting, high-pressure, spirit-killing, highly scripted instructional programs.”
I hope OKCPS is imposing much less of the instruction that my students complained about, saying they had been “robbed of an education” by teach-to-the-test (which I refused to do). But, that brings me to the question that administrators should still ask, even if they have to do so discreetly. Why in the world would the district need an assistant superintendent of student achievement and accountability?
After all, the district already has a Planning, Research and Evaluation (PRE) department that has done an excellent job for decades. And, hopefully, administrators still understand what the PRE used to tell us: When student achievement data is connected with accountability, the data will likely be corrupted. We’ve had a quarter of a century’s worth of experiences with data-driven accountability, using invalid and unreliable metrics. Given that history, any accountability office should ask whether it is doing more good or being forced to do more harm to teaching and learning.
The full op-ed ran in The Oklahoman. You can read it here.