For Real?

ASCD provides excellent new briefs with stories covering the globe. I tend to read them in the morning over coffee but often I'm heated by articles end. My experience this morning is related back to an article from
2/12 "Did Help Get Left Behind"

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/070211/19child.htm

One of my personal goals is to focus on being more positive and working within a more positive environment. Pulling out all of the positive elements in each experience. So, I go right to the Success Stories Section which reads...

Success stories. The result of all this testing is supposed to be improved performance. Ivan Small, the superintendent of schools in Poplar, Mont., tells one success story for that model. The law's requirement to break down test scores by poverty level, Small says, caused him to figure out why his low-income students were underperforming the higher-income ones. His findings, in turn, led him to replace old readers with a whole new literacy curriculum. It also changed the way he thought about homework. "There are multiple families living in a household of two or three bedrooms . ... Is there time or a place for homework?" The answer was often "No," so Small and his staff created an after-school study program.

Centennial Place Elementary School in Atlanta has also benefited from NCLB.The school had been collecting data even before the law was passed, but it had never separated out special education students. When it did, it found dramatic results. "We had a big gap," says Cynthia Kuhlman, the school's former principal. "Seeing that right there ... was a critical picture for us." The staff started giving these students extra help, reviewing their progress, and holding more parent conferences. As a result, proficiency levels rose from 41 to more than 80 percent.

OK.. success you say, so why would I be heated? Where was the leadership at this school that they weren't disaggregating data, analyzing data, using data to shape instruction? So NCLB forced them to "break it down" but the reality is when I read this I began to question the leaderships training and why they weren't looking for patterns in data well before NCLB?

The first paragraph about the man who (forgive the sarcastic tone) "found the root of inequality between his "low-income students and higher ones" because NCLB broke his scores out by poverty level?!!!! Come on here, did you just admit in a National Newspaper that you had never looked at your children's scores before in such a light?

My frustration lies with us as the professionals, that we are continued to be called on. If we are the leaders of our schools we need to begin to own ALL that goes with that and know how to guide instruction based on the data around us, qualitative and quantitative. Did we also admit through this article unless we are forced to collect data we don't and maybe we don't know how?!

Please come out from under the rock which you are hiding and if you're training wasn't adequate get some PD and/or ask for some guidance so you can be the instructional leader you could be.