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Voices in Urban Education
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Using Data for Decisions
VUE Number 18, Winter 2008
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
EXCERPT:
Using Data to Inform Decision Making in Urban School Districts: Progress and New Challenges
Excerpted with permission from Richard J. Murnane, Elizabeth A. City, and Kristan Singleton, “Using Data to Inform Decision Making in Urban School Districts: Progress and New Challenges,” from A Decade of Urban School Reform: Persistence and Progress in the Boston Public Schools, edited by S. Paul Reville with Celine Coggins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2007), pp. 153-174.
By Richard J. Murnane, Elizabeth A. City, and Kristan Singleton
Richard J. Murnane is the Juliana W. and William Foss Thompson Professor of Education and Society at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Elizabeth A. City is a member of the senior faculty at Boston's School Leadership Institute. Kristan Singleton is tools and technologies manager at Education Resource Strategies.
> Author's biographies
Boston Public Schools has developed a set of tools and supports to enable schools to use state test scores effectively in planning instruction.
One of the challenges every school district faces is to provide schools with the information and tools to educate children well. The challenge is particularly great in urban districts, which serve high concentrations of students living in poverty and students whose first language is not English. The life prospects for these students are critically influenced by the extent to which they master the skills needed to thrive in a rapidly changing society. Detailed understanding of the skills and knowledge that individual students have mastered is essential to making the best use of scarce instructional time. Having the tools to manage information on students' skills and to do so efficiently is essential to making use of that information.
From the beginning of Thomas Payzant's eleven-year tenure as superintendent of the Boston Public Schools (BPS), using student assessment results to inform decision making has been a part of the district's strategy to increase student achievement. Understanding the progress Boston has made and the challenges it still faces in developing a system of student assessments and tools to facilitate good decision making is relevant not only to improving education in Boston, but indeed education throughout the country.
Instruction through Assessment
Since 1998, the Boston Public Schools have been required to administer the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) English Language Arts [ELA] and mathematics tests to virtually all students in designated grades. Superintendent Payzant made clear that a key challenge for BPS schools was to improve MCAS scores and to do so in a way that actually improved the quality of education BPS students received. In a January 2001 memo to the Boston School Committee, he announced that learning from MCAS results would be an element of the strategy to accomplish this goal.1
BPS has made enormous progress in providing schools with technical tools for learning from MCAS results. These tools are important because they save teachers and administrators large amounts of time, which is the scarcest resource in schools. Still, technical tools are not sufficient for schools to make constructive use of student assessment results. A culture change is also necessary, a change from a culture in which teachers work independently to a culture in which teachers work collaboratively to identify students' learning problems and to design and implement coherent strategies to ameliorate them. As we explain at the end of this section, creating a culture of shared responsibility for student learning in every school is proving more difficult to achieve than creating common facility with technical tools to examine student assessment results. We begin by describing some of the advances in technical tools.
---------------------------
1 Memorandum to the Boston School Committee, January 12, 2001.
Archives
Using Data for Decisions
VUE Number 18, Winter 2008
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
EXCERPT:
Using Data to Inform Decision Making in Urban School Districts: Progress and New Challenges
Excerpted with permission from Richard J. Murnane, Elizabeth A. City, and Kristan Singleton, “Using Data to Inform Decision Making in Urban School Districts: Progress and New Challenges,” from A Decade of Urban School Reform: Persistence and Progress in the Boston Public Schools, edited by S. Paul Reville with Celine Coggins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2007), pp. 153-174.
By Richard J. Murnane, Elizabeth A. City, and Kristan Singleton
Richard J. Murnane is the Juliana W. and William Foss Thompson Professor of Education and Society at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Elizabeth A. City is a member of the senior faculty at Boston's School Leadership Institute. Kristan Singleton is tools and technologies manager at Education Resource Strategies.
> Author's biographies
Boston Public Schools has developed a set of tools and supports to enable schools to use state test scores effectively in planning instruction.
One of the challenges every school district faces is to provide schools with the information and tools to educate children well. The challenge is particularly great in urban districts, which serve high concentrations of students living in poverty and students whose first language is not English. The life prospects for these students are critically influenced by the extent to which they master the skills needed to thrive in a rapidly changing society. Detailed understanding of the skills and knowledge that individual students have mastered is essential to making the best use of scarce instructional time. Having the tools to manage information on students' skills and to do so efficiently is essential to making use of that information.
From the beginning of Thomas Payzant's eleven-year tenure as superintendent of the Boston Public Schools (BPS), using student assessment results to inform decision making has been a part of the district's strategy to increase student achievement. Understanding the progress Boston has made and the challenges it still faces in developing a system of student assessments and tools to facilitate good decision making is relevant not only to improving education in Boston, but indeed education throughout the country.
Instruction through Assessment
Since 1998, the Boston Public Schools have been required to administer the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) English Language Arts [ELA] and mathematics tests to virtually all students in designated grades. Superintendent Payzant made clear that a key challenge for BPS schools was to improve MCAS scores and to do so in a way that actually improved the quality of education BPS students received. In a January 2001 memo to the Boston School Committee, he announced that learning from MCAS results would be an element of the strategy to accomplish this goal.1
BPS has made enormous progress in providing schools with technical tools for learning from MCAS results. These tools are important because they save teachers and administrators large amounts of time, which is the scarcest resource in schools. Still, technical tools are not sufficient for schools to make constructive use of student assessment results. A culture change is also necessary, a change from a culture in which teachers work independently to a culture in which teachers work collaboratively to identify students' learning problems and to design and implement coherent strategies to ameliorate them. As we explain at the end of this section, creating a culture of shared responsibility for student learning in every school is proving more difficult to achieve than creating common facility with technical tools to examine student assessment results. We begin by describing some of the advances in technical tools.
---------------------------
1 Memorandum to the Boston School Committee, January 12, 2001.
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