This document has been formatted for printing from your browser from the Web site of the Illinois Association of School Boards.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE -- This document is © copyrighted by the Illinois Association of School Boards. IASB hereby grants to school districts and other Internet users the right to download, print and reproduce this document provided that (a) the Illinois Association of School Boards is noted as publisher and copyright holder of the document and (b) any reproductions of this document are disseminated without charge and not used for any commercial purpose.

Illinois School Board Journal
November/December 2002

Data drives change on journey to reform

by Linda Dawson

Linda Dawson is IASB director of editorial services and Journal editor.

This is the second in a series following the progress of school reform in Illinois. Progress on the journey has shifted into high gear as districts scramble to comply with "No Child Left Behind" legislation. This series seeks to share information from Decatur School District 61 as well as other Illinois districts on journeys they envision will lead to increased student achievement.

How do you get from one point to another? You either put one foot in front of the other or use a vehicle that will take you where you want to go. No matter the destination, you must take those initial steps to make progress.

How do you measure progress? You can either count your steps or your miles, or look behind and ahead to gauge your distance from the goal.

The pivotal point, however, in getting from one place to another, is to decide where you're going and how you will measure your progress along the way.

When it comes to school reform, the local school board needs to decide where the district is going in terms of creating a master plan - a vision - of what its district should be.

"Boards need to have a clear vision and mission," says Angie Peifer, director of board development for the Illinois Association of School Boards. "Otherwise, they're off on random acts of improvement."

To clarify that vision and mission, boards can no longer depend on what they "think" or "feel" are the right answers. They need to ask tough questions of themselves, of their staff and of the community to determine just what it is that everyone expects the district to achieve - their goals.

While many boards have been involved with strategic planning and goal setting for a number of years, getting the right information to make those directional decisions has often been haphazard, with board members working from their "best guess" of what the community wants and needs from its schools.

"The days of setting goals with 'I think' are over," according to Sandy Gundlach, IASB field services director for the Abe Lincoln, Kaskaskia, Southwestern and Two Rivers divisions. "That hasn't improved education. Now they need hard pieces of evidence."

That "evidence" is data, some of which comes from asking questions and some of which is already available from sources within the district. But how do you know what questions to ask? How do you know what data is available?

The easiest way is to start asking. But Gundlach cautions boards to ask questions of the right people.

Often, she said, board members rely on their friends and business acquaintances - the people they interact with every day - to form their perceptions of what the district wants and needs. Visions created solely from this scope of information may miss some important points, because most people tend to form friendships - both casual and business relationships - with people who think the way they do.

The problem with perceptions is that they are just that: they are what someone "thinks" is the case. The reality may be - and often is - different.

This is what one researcher calls "the ingrained narrative." You have probably heard different versions in your community. It begins with "There's nothing in (fill in the community) for young people to do," lists a litany of other community ills and proceeds to the inevitable question: "Why would anyone want to live here?"

Richard Harwood, president of The Harwood Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, says these common narratives we keep telling ourselves have a way of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. In his firm's work with Flint, Michigan, he even found that people will persist in telling the same, tired, wrong stories, while at the same time attending community meetings, professing to work well together and believing that things will get better.

"I would argue our ingrained narrative is one of the greatest obstacles facing this community and this country," Harwood said in a speech to the United Way of Flint and Genesee County in 2001, "and that until we release the ingrained narrative from our souls, we will not be able to step forth and create change."

As was stated in the initial story in this series, "Journey to reform begins with sharing" (March/April 2002), trying to reform an ingrained system is never easy. And that's why those working on school reform and working to improve student learning need to have a plan for where they want to go and then arm themselves with data in order to track their progress.

While Decatur School District 61 had a strategic plan, members of the board and administration realized that in order to move the district forward in terms of student achievement, a new plan would need to be written. Following a retreat where the mission, vision and six goals were mapped out by the board, the Decatur Partnership Council steering committee looked at those goals to determine what data already was available, what additional data might be available and what new data might be needed to track progress.

First, the committee was charged with assigning a weight to each of the goals and then each of the sub-goals. By using a double-weighting process, which seemed intimidating at the outset, the committee easily came to agreement on what was most important to the group as a whole.

Once prioritized, each goal and sub-goal was tied to specific pieces of information that would measure how the board and the community would know that the goal had been met. Take, for example, Goal 1: Increase student achievement. Sub-goal 1.2 states, "Set high expectations for student learning driven by a deep integration of academic standards throughout the organization."

For results under that sub-goal, the committee said it wanted to see both the graduation rate and the number of college/technical school admissions increase by 5 percent each year. How will they know? By charting the number of graduates, the number of post-secondary admissions and the test scores from the ISAT and Prairie State Achievement Exam.

Small groups worked on each goal and sub-goal, trying to decide what information was available and how each aspect of the plan would be tracked. Each of the small groups contained at least one person from the staff familiar with the current programs (i.e., the finance director worked within a group on Goal 3: Maintain a balanced budget that reflects district priorities).

All this information, along with results expected and measurements for the additional sub-goals, was then handed off to a writing committee of six to put everything into one format. Because this is a document that will be shared with the community, the writing team opted for simple language that would be readily understood. For each goal, they prepared a grid with the following parts:

To accomplish this we will:

The results we expect:

How we will measure this:

By when:

Now the Decatur board will have a strategic plan to share with its community that not only sets the course for the district but also contains "benchmarks" against which the district can measure its progress.

For Superintendent Elmer "Mac" McPherson, this represents a big breakthrough for his district. The difference between the district's old and new approach to planning is like a connect-the-dots picture you'd find in a children's book.

"The dots have not been connected to this point," McPherson said. "Now we have created a strategic plan based on our core values and beliefs.

"We built in accountability measures and from that data, all the decisions must be made. This gives us focus. We can look at it over time and make intermittent assessments.

"Without this strategic plan, without having our goals tied to data that we can measure, we would be off on random acts of improvement."