Policy Review Part 3: Use of Data

Excerpt from CGR Report

“Data-driven decision-making, “using data” and “continuous improvement” are familiar catch phrases in the business community, but what do they mean in the world of education, and how far has the district come in this work?

In education, the notion of using data has become closely linked to accountability-focused initiatives, from New York School Report Cards that publicize school performance to recent plans to include test scores in teacher evaluations.

But data can act as a flashlight as much as a hammer, used not just to identify problems but also to illuminate possible solutions. This means going beyond a simplistic focus on standardized test scores.

Download report: Policy Review #3 – Use of Data

Hail, Regents! The most important task of the NYS Board of Regents is the selection of the NYS Education Commissioner. It is hard to imagine that they could have done better than David Steiner (see GothamSchools.org profile) .

Keynote at CGR’s teacher preparation symposium last week, Commissioner Steiner just kept talking sense all morning. From his formal address to each question response, he was ever gracious but direct, balanced and uncompromising.

Picking Steiner was certainly controversial. While a professor at Boston University in 2003, he authored a study of 16 teacher education programs across the nation that criticized them as ideologically driven and lacking rigor, a finding that hardly endeared him to the education elite. A pragmatist, one of the facts that he found disturbing was the lack of emphasis on skill development, noting that only 3 of the schools used video or audio tape to train teachers. As Dean of Hunter College’s School of Education, he put these lessons to work in Hunter’s program. He also teamed up with three successful charter school operators, Teach for America and the NYC Department of Education to form Teacher U, a new approach to teacher training emphasizing teaching as a craft, not an academic discipline. Steiner reinforced that view last week, noting that schools of education are organized more like liberal arts programs than as professional schools. With his charter school partners, Steiner emphasizes that teaching is a skill that can be taught and must be practiced.

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