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.