Doing the same thing over and over again…

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Hechinger Report just published an article on how having teachers study student data doesn’t actually result in better student learning outcomes.

Think about that for a minute. That finding is pretty counterintuitive, right? For at least two decades now we have been asking teachers to take summative and formative data and analyze the heck out of them. We create data teams and data walls. We implement benchmarking assessments and professional learning communities (PLCs). We make graphs and charts and tables. We sort and rank students and we flag and color code their data… And yet, research study after research study confirms that all of it has no positive impact on student learning:

[Heather Hill, professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education] “reviewed 23 student outcomes from 10 different data programs used in schools and found that the majority showed no benefits for students” . . . . Similarly, “another pair of researchers also reviewed studies on the use of data analysis in schools, much of which is produced by assessments throughout the school year, and reached the same conclusion. ‘Research does not show that using interim assessments improves student learning,’ said Susan Brookhart, professor emerita at Duquesne University and associate editor of the journal Applied Measurement in Education.” 

All of that time. All of that energy. All of that effort. Most of it for nothing. NOTHING.

No wonder the long-term reviews of standards-, testing-, and data-oriented educational policy and reform efforts have concluded that they are mostly a complete waste. We’re not closing gaps with other countries on international assessments. Instead, our own country’s achievement gaps are widening. The same patterns are occurring with our own national assessments here in the United States. Similarly, our efforts to ‘toughen’ teacher evaluations also show no positive impact on students. It’s all pointless. POINTLESS.

The past two decades have been incredibly maddening and demoralizing for millions of educators and students. And for what? NOTHING.

Are school administrators even paying attention? Or are they still leaning into outdated, unproductive paradigms of school reform?

This was the line in the article that really stood out for me:

Most commonly, teachers review or re-teach the topic the way they did the first time or they give a student a worksheet for more practice drills.

In other words, in school after school, across all of these different studies, our response to students who are struggling is to… do the same thing again. Good grief.

Make school different.

Image credit: Wincing, Frédéric Poirot

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