Evidence-Based Practice
VUE Number 6, Winter 2005
Audio Clip 4:
An interview with Meredith Honig and Cynthia Coburn
The challenges central offices face in using evidence well.
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TRANSCRIPT:
CC: There's also issues around the structure and organization of districts that makes effective evidence use challenging, I think. Most district personnel are split between multiple responsibilities often attached to discrete funding lines or particular programs. So they are always juggling multiple goals and priorities that they have to be responsive to. So their attention is often very divided. So they have little time to devote to particular issues in depth. And that makes it difficult to pour through reams of data or search out the precise study that's going to help them make a decision about this.
But there're also issues around district organization. A lot of relevant decisions are actually stretched across these multiple layers and multiple divisions. For example, you can imagine decisions about reading instruction being make in the curriculum office; you can imagine them also being made in the assessment office, or the people in charge of Title I, among others.
And in many central offices, in part because of lack of resources, communication and coordination across these divisions is really challenging. You have people in these positions with very different purposes, very different organizational missions for their work, and sometimes very different professional backgrounds. And you can get very different interpretations of the same evidence and a lot of difficulty of coordinating across.
To really make systematic use of evidence a priority requires some allocation of time to the issue. There's no getting around the fact these are complex processes and it just takes time to access evidence, to interpret it, to problem solve around actual steps in response to what you find. So, if I were the superintendent, not underestimating the challenge of doing this but really finding ways to create time in people's schedules to make that possible.
MH: And that's one of the messages of the paper as well, which is that one of the things that supports evidence use in central offices are opportunities for central office staff to come together around questions about, "what do we know, what do we need to know. How do we use what we know."
