Chapter 7

After spending more than 20 years helping school and district leaders make sense of their numbers, I have become more impatient and yet more hopeful. My impatience comes from my strong belief that some mismeasurement is correctable. That’s the part that’s due to bureaucratic ineptitude, slothfulness and innocent human errors. But I’m not naïve enough to think it’s all correctable without friction among competing parties. Some mismeasurement has evolved because it has served both institutional and professional interests. To take one example of institutional interests, everyone wants students to graduate, so there’s an incentive for districts to make it increasingly easy for students to earn a diploma. The bar gets lowered so far in some districts that the value of the diplomas they award become questionable. To take an example of professional interests, consider the state of teacher evaluations. Principals need the cooperation of their teachers. So, principals by and large evaluate teachers without providing critical feedback, believing this wins them a more cooperative staff. The long tradition of teacher compensation that rewards time-in-service and education adds to the ethos of treating all teachers equally, or as “widgets,” the key word in the title of the report of the National Center for Teaching Quality. The result: almost no information captured in teacher evaluations about the quality of teaching. My hopefulness comes from meeting and working with many school and district leaders who are hard at work bringing evidence and empirical methods to the table. My hope also comes from the fact that you’re reading this book. If I’m not falling under the spell of premature exuberance, then I have a hunch you have already joined (or are about to join) the small but growing legion of principals, superintendents, school board members, teacher leaders and citizens who are ready to insist that evidence and reason must justify decisions. Our small band of empiricists is already suspicious when school leaders justify their decisions with “experience” alone. When someone high up justifies her opinion with “tradition” or “common sense,” we reply, “Show me the evidence!” Among the “common sense” crowd, most fall into three camps: those who are puzzled or overwhelmed by too much data; those who distrust measurement altogether; and those who believe that wisdom comes solely from experience. Each deserves attention of a somewhat different sort. Each has a reason to undervalue or disfavor empirical paths to knowledge. Persuading colleagues begins with understanding their viewpoint….