Data-Driven To Distraction (Dennis Shirley and Andy Hargreaves)
This Education Week “Commentary” by Boston College professors Shirley and Hargreaves was published October 4, 2006. In England, RATL (see below) continues its collaborative, educator-driven process of reform “by schools for schools” in 2011.
Every few years in American education, a new slogan is coined as the Next Big Thing. Total quality management, shared decision-making, and outcomes-based education all marched across the educational landscape once, grabbing headlines, filling copy—and leaving little improvement in learning in their wake.
Right now, data-driven instruction, results-oriented improvement, and evidence-based education are the watchwords. They show up everywhere—from state education department Web sites to principals’ and superintendents’ job descriptions—insisting that instructional practices should be driven by the analysis of student-achievement data as measured by prescribed standardized tests….
Teachers are no longer the drivers of reform, but the driven. Many teachers and schools, in fact, are being driven to distraction. Under the pressures of the federal No Child Left Behind Act and its mandate for “adequate yearly
