Evidence-Based Practice
VUE Number 6, Winter 2005
Audio Clip 2:
An interview with Meredith Honig and Cynthia Coburn
What's known about central office administrators as evidence users?
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TRANSCRIPT:
MH: We looked specifically at central office administrators as the evidence users. There is actually a relatively extensive literature on school-based practioners like principals and teachers as evidence users. But there is actually an irony at the center of our work, which is, that the push for district/central office administrators to use evidence, that push is not based on as well-established a research base. That using research is effective in the sense that you can tie research-based decisions to academic achievement, for example.
This is not to say that the push for central office administrators to use research is not a good idea; this is not to say that. There are many logical reasons why you might want central office administrators to do this. It's a sort of natural extension of the standards-based reform movement, in the sense that now you have these systems of standards, how can you marshal a variety of evidence to assess the extent to which you're achieving those standards?
So we were really trying to stake out what that even means when we say that the central office is using evidence, what are the various types of evidence they're being asked to use; what are the various types of evidence they seem to actually use in practice. In that sense I'd say we found that it's quite common that central offices use a host of information in their decision making, both formally and informally.
One of the strongest messages of our work is that the use of evidence of various kinds is difficult to do. We might not see basic improvements data, like being able to tie research-based decisions to increased test scores, for example. We might not see that presently, but there are clear signs that many central offices are building the kind of capacity that they would need to use information in smarter ways.
