Learning Facts: The Brave New World of Data-Informed Instruction.

In just the last ten years, goaded by broad and still unsettled cultural shifts, education practices have changed dramatically. Schools are no longer just recording and analyzing inputs--dollars spent, number of days of instruction, numbers of students per teacher--but pushing their data-gathering and analysis efforts into the brave new world of outcomes. Who is dropping out and why? Which students are reading at grade level, and which are not? How are 4th graders doing on fractions and decimals? Today's educators are deciphering, and using, the results of student assessments better than ever. And it is not a reform at the margins. "Nearly all states are building high-tech student data systems to collect, categorize and crunch the endless gigabytes of attendance logs, test scores and other information collected in public schools," reported the New York Times in a front-page story last May, confirming the scope of the trend. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Hundreds of state education departments and school districts, driven in part by the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) mandate to demonstrate "adequate yearly progress," are retooling their assessment regimens and technology systems to use outcome data to drive instructional and policymaking decisions (see Figure 1). A study of 32 San Francisco Bay Area K-8 schools released in 2003 by the Bay Area School Reform Collaborative (now Springboard Schools) found that "what matters most [in closing the achievement gap] is how schools use data. " In fact, those schools that had accelerated the progress of their low-performing students--who were catching up with high-performing students--were those that regularly captured data for the purpose of improving results. What follows is a close look at three schools that have integrated data into their instructional decisionmaking. Each has concluded that the practice has helped improve student achievement. I examine a traditional public school, a district-turned-charter school run by an education management organization, and a relatively new charter school. The experiences of these schools illustrate the benefits of mining both internal assessments and standardized test results for data to guide curriculum decisions and inform classroom instruction. Four Stars in the Lone Star State Evelyn S. Thompson Elementary School is located in a Texas district that has been nationally recognized for improving student achievement over the last decade. The state's accountability measures, on which No Child Left Behind was modeled, have grown increasingly stringent. Even as the district's percentage of low-income students has risen, student achievement in the Aldine Independent School District (AISD)--a mid-sized urban district with 66 schools and 56,000 students on the northwest edge of Houston--has kept pace. But it wasn't always so. In 1994, the first time the new Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) tests were given to all 4th-, 8th-, and 10th-grade students, half the kids in the district failed. Until then, Aldine thought it had a decent school system; its students often received awards and scholarships and the local press wrote favorably about them. But when the district received an "academically unacceptable" label that year, it got a wake-up call as well. "Our educational philosophy had been all about self-esteem as our key goal," recalls Superintendent Nadine Kujawa, a Texas native who had worked in the district since the early 1960s and in 1994 was the deputy superintendent of human resources and instruction. Over the next decade Aldine undertook major structural reforms that emphasized academics and student achievement. "Now," says Kujawa, "we believe that if students are successful academically, self-esteem will take care of itself. " The key to this new emphasis on achievement was the TRIAND data-management system, developed in partnership with a local software vendor to capture, analyze, and share specific student achievement data among administrators, school leaders, teachers, and even parents. …