How to Avoid Misunderstanding, Misinterpreting and Distorting Data
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For book groups
Ideas for district leaders, principals and school board members
A book group can be your opportunity to create a neutral turf where colleagues who may often disagree with each other, aim their comments toward a book instead. A book group can also be a way for you to build group agreement of the best way to measure something you all consider to be important. Here are some specific ideas you might try. Each idea is focused on just one chapter.
District leaders
- Equity is easy to affirm as a principle, but hard to measure. Why not commit to measure inequity, but first read and discuss chapter four, on gap mismeasurement? It will spare you from discussing the meaning of poor evidence and guide you toward sounder evidence. You’ll stimulate discussion of how to discover evidence of bias, and more importantly, avoid misassigning its causes.
- Enrollment is sagging in the wake of the pandemic, and your district cabinet is rightfully concerned. Why not ask your cabinet members to read and discuss chapter six, where cost-benefit analysis is explored? Before you decide whether to allocate funds to advertise your schools, you should have a measure of the estimated return every dollar of advertising should return (and not over one year alone).
Principals
- Reading skills of early elementary kids is often mismeasured. You want to take advantage of multiple measures of reading you have, but your teachers favor one test over all the others. Why not convene a book group of your lead teachers plus leaders from the district’s reading support team, and read and discuss chapter two? You’ll learn how a district used multiple measures to bridge the divide between advocates of Balanced Literacy and Structured Literacy.
- Site planning bugs you. You consider it a charade, pretending rather than planning. Why not get fellow principals together to read and discuss chapter two? You’ll learn how the imprecision and uncertainty inherent in testing makes accurate forecasts of students’ results impossible. Learn how to put the “fuzzy factor” to work in your plans.
School board members
- Accountability marks from your state department of education seem off-the-mark. They fault your district for lack of progress of English learners. Why not get your board members and your superintendent together to read and discuss chapter five? The official way of gauging the progress of EL students suffers from twisted logic. Your study session could lead to a smarter policy.
- Staffing questions are part of your evaluation of the superintendent. Is your district able to identify the best teachers in each grade level in each subject? Does your HR director know who the top reading teachers are in the early grades? Why not convene a board study session, and read chapter six, which covers the riddle of how to evaluate teachers, and cites research that’s actionable.
