Has the reform cart outpaced the data horse?
Editor’s note: Kristin Klopfenstein is the executive director of the Education Innovation Institute at the University of Northern Colorado.
Several high-profile education reforms passed by the Colorado legislature in the last few years rely on massive collections of data to work as planned. For example, the 2009 accountability bill requires administrators at struggling schools to use school-level data to drive the improvement planning process.
Senate Bill 191’s teacher evaluation provisions require more, however. Administrators must be able to drill down to the individual level, accurately linking teachers with students to evaluate teachers based on how well their students progress over the year. And Senate Bill 10-036 tills the soil for teacher prep programs to monitor the achievement of their graduates’ students in order to improve teacher prep programs.
All are ambitious laws — and I sometimes fear that Colorado’s reform cart has raced ahead of the data horse.