It seems across all sectors, and education is no different, too often we do not have consensus around how to improve the current reality. When we do not know what our next critical work is as an organization, we can expend precious resources (time and money) applying solutions to problems that do not exist.

In my last piece as a guest contributor, we covered the critical need to have actionable data to help our systems navigate through and beyond the COVID 19 pandemic. The title, To Set Your Course, You Must First Know Where You Are, applies to the following four data domains that we work in as professional educators: demographic, perceptual, contextual, achievement.

In my first two pieces as guest contributor, we focused on the urgency of what some refer to as the “twin pandemics,” social unrest and COVID 19, causing us to need access to high quality data to ensure we are framing the issues unique to each school system during these tumultuous times. In addition to having high quality data to frame clear problems of practice, it is essential each school organization consistently measure and build high-quality culture, as absent high-quality culture, little work benefitting children gets done.

Most schools are good, defined as providing the expected opportunities leading to expected achievement for children. The opportunity gap is created by factors either outside of a school’s control or at the maximum, factors schools can influence but cannot control. The question then becomes, what happens inside of those very few exceptional schools where we see student achievement at levels the school’s demographic would not predict?

In this five-part blog series I have questioned policy and practice, over reliant on standardized test scores and indirectly the standardized movement, against the stark reality of few schools providing transformative opportunities for students inside of their school systems.