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Is Anyone Winning the Data Wars?We can remember the reading wars and sadly they are still going on. Now we have the data wars too: What data is important? How do we help teachers access and use data to guide instruction? What data is dangerous and hurting student outcomes?

Carol Black’s blog, “A Thousand Rivers,” describes diverse global learning environments to critique our attention to data and programs such as phonics in our schools.  I don’t agree with everything she writes in this extensive article, however, one quote about data stands out:

“Collecting data on human learning based on children’s behavior in school is like collecting data on killer whales based on their behavior in Sea World.”

In workshops with administrators and teachers on matters as diverse as how to use student test data; choose, implement and evaluate a reading program; or implement system-wide inclusion, I ask folks to write about and then talk about how they learned to read. Everyone remembers. Learning to read is a big deal! My father taught me how to read by reading the Sunday Daily News comics to me every week. He’d make a special breakfast, lox and eggs and onions with a bialy and read ‘Nancy” and “Brenda Starr Reporter” to me. These were my faves. My dad was orphaned and abandoned at birth. He had no formal schooling. In fact, he had no language until he was 10 and emigrated to the U.S. Even after that his English was spotty. We lived in a one bedroom tenement in the South Bronx (aka Fort Apache); he, my mom and my sister who was 8 years older than I. She was a terrific and prolific reader and insisted that I trade the Bobbsy Twins for Thomas Mann. The storefront library on Southern Blvd. saved the two of us. Anyway, my dad would read the comics to me, pointing to every word and now and then ask me to read the word. Soon I was reading the comics to him and the Golden Books to my mom. When I entered kindergarten at 5 by today’s standards I would be a proficient 4th grade reader. My teachers always gave me more “advanced” books; I loved Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe and all poetry. They helped me with the hard words or explained stuff to me that I was unsure of. They somehow knew how to do this without formal testing, data reviews or rubrics. They knew what I loved to read and what I found boring. There were at least 45 kids in the class in my elementary school. Maybe some were even repeating the grade. They all could read, albeit at different levels and that was okay. We cheered when they read Dick and Jane out loud or recited “Paul Revere’s Ride.”

Somehow children learned to read well,  add or even how to solve complex problems before we formalized data collection and analysis. Could we do more now to advance student learning? Sure. Does the Reform Movement, Common Core, Standardized tests and Pearson help? How many dots on the head of a pin? There are more caring and expert teachers in every school across America than there has ever been. These same teachers however have to spend precious hours on data teams, data analysis, data reporting, testing, grading, retesting and their own evaluations are based on this same questionable data. Third graders instead of reading about favorite topics or heroes have to sit still and struggle through boring reading passages and then answer unclear questions that their teachers are unsure of. This leads to frustration, reading as a stressful and often punitive activity, especially for weaker students. Perhaps this is why boys score lower than girls. Maybe it’s more about sitting still than reading level. Perhaps teachers have not been given ample time and professional development to relearn and learn to teach math conceptually yet “It’s on the test!” Applying mathematical concepts to solve complex real world problems is much different from learning the mechanics of subtraction.

Data is important, but not just test data. Does the teacher know each and every day how every child is feeling? Data collection strategy: “Jane, how are you feeling?” Critical data with no cost. What interests the student, engages the student, excites the student? Are they hungry or did they have a fight before coming to school? It is pretty well documented by now that the reliability and validity of the tests are questionable at best. We’ve left the essence of the child and of the teacher behind. Perhaps if we rethink how we learned, we can help our teachers and students more.

Carol Black asks about how we somehow all learned to use computers; especially those of us who went to school before there was a smart board in every classroom. How did you learn to use a computer? I bet we all learned in different ways, but somewhere along the line we became proficient.

School leadership can build whole school capacity and ensure teachers have a broad range of skills and materials to not only teach reading, but also all subject matter more successfully. Acknowledge and celebrate the many small moments of success. Learning and indeed school can and should be joyful. There is essentially no need for reading wars or data wars or math wars to continue. Phonics may be helpful to some students and not others. With appropriate professional development teachers can gain the requisite skills to know what data they need and how to find and use it. They need to ask the right questions, including how they and their students are feeling.