Overview: Standards for Data Use

Just as the education system is now driven by student standards -- what students should know and be able to do – there are also important education leadership standards -- what principals should know and be able to do to lead a successful school building. Leadership standard have come in several forms over the past few years, including, but not limited to, the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC) leadership standards, and the Education Leaders Constituents Council (ELCC) standards for advanced programs in educational leadership. These standards are a documented set of skills that the field has deemed necessary to be a high quality education leader. With respect to data-informed decision-making, there are specific standards that relate to the skills and behaviors needed by leaders to effectively use data in their school.

District-Level Data Standards
District policies and practices set the tone and standards for how effective schools are at using data. Districts need to be clear on their standards and expectations for data use and thus communicate this information clearly to all district employees and schools. Some policies and practices that districts should ensure are: assisting schools with creating benchmark assessments, providing district-level data to schools in a timely way, providing support and evaluations of school leaders in how they use data and in how they support schools in making changes based on data and reviewing written policies about expectations for data use in school buildings. Districts also need to provide professional development opportunities for principals and teachers to help them meet the standards of using data.

The role of the district in ensuring that leaders meet high standards for data use is to recruit, hire and train school leaders who understand how to use data for school improvement and raise student achievement. District professional development opportunities should be aligned to the state leadership standards – including the use of data to inform instructional decisions.  Districts may form partnerships with higher education institutions to ensure leaders graduate with a strong understanding of data use. Tools that assess leaders’ effectiveness are other continuous improvement measures that will ensure school leaders the ability to use data to inform all aspects of their school.

District offices that use data model high standards of data use for school leaders. In high-performing districts, the superintendent and school board members know how to lead and support data use. Data is used to gauge progress on district and school goals. High-performing districts have long-term professional development strategies to help all district personnel use data for decisionmaking. The district fosters a culture of support, trust and continuous improvement around data use, with constant communication about the expectations and standards for data use in the district.

1. Essential Elements

The current set of accepted leadership standards suggest that the ability to collect, understand, analyze and use data to inform all decisions is a very important leadership skill needed to increase student achievement. Standards on data use fit into a larger set of leadership standards.

For example, the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC) includes these standards related to data use:

• Understand information sources, data collection and data-analysis strategies
• Understand curriculum design, implementation, evaluation and refinement
• Understand measurement, evaluation and assessment strategies
• Understand the change process for systems, organization and individuals
• Understand current technologies that support management functions.

Mid-Continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL), in its report Balanced Leadership, has found that the following data use skills have a statistically significant effect on school improvement:

• Leaders are directly involved in the design and implementation of curriculum, instruction and assessment practices
• Leaders establish clear goals and keeps those goals in the forefront of the school's     attention
• Leaders monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of school practices and their impact on student learning
• Leaders are change agents who are willing to and actively challenge the status quo
• Leaders provide contingent rewards that recognize and reward individual accomplishments.

• Ensure that a variety of sources of data that illuminate student learning are used in the forging of vision and goals. Data sources include assessment data related to student learning, demographic data pertaining to students and the community, and information on patterns of opportunity to learn.

• Be diligent about providing feedback on performance to colleagues on a consistent basis and in a timely manner. This can include using personal knowledge developed through numerous classroom observations, both informal and formal, and employing a variety of supervisory and evaluation strategies.

• Personally promote a serious attitude about data-based decisionmaking among colleagues.

• Ensure that assessment systems are comprehensive. Assessments address both classroom and school-based activity and a wide variety of monitoring and data collection strategies should be used. 

• Ensure that student learning is measured using an assortment of techniques. For example, comprehensive designs often include teacher record keeping systems, end-of-level or end-of-unit reports, student work products, criterion-referenced tests, and standardized measures of student performance.

• Disaggregate information on the important conditions and outcomes of schooling (e.g., program placement of students, test results) by relevant bio-social characteristics of students (e.g., gender, race, class).

• Assist schools in constructing assessment systems in ways that foster the triangulation of data from multiple sources in arriving at judgments about the effectiveness of curricular and instructional programs and organizational operations. 
  

• Ensure that assessment data is at the heart of (a) mission development, (b) instructional planning, (c) the evaluation of the curricular program, (d) the identification of and the design of services for special needs students, (e) monitoring progress on school goals and improvement efforts, and (f) the evaluation of school staff.

• Provide teachers and parents with assessment results on a regular basis.

• Ensure that professional development opportunities and experiences flow from data on student achievement, link carefully with district and school goals, are integrated into the culture of the school, and focus on student learning.
  
  
• Assess leaders' ability to use data for school improvement.
  

• Does your state have specific education leadership standards? And do those standards include a component for data use? Are district standards aligned to these state standards?
• Has the district defined specifically the data analysis skills required of a high-quality school and district leader? Are those skills embedded in the standards?
  
• How are school leaders measured against those standards? How are they evaluated on the data use component?
  
• How are school leaders supported in achieving the standards related to data use? What activities, tools and professional development opportunities are available to school leaders?
• How do district central office staff work with principals to diagnose student achievement in the buildings and develop improvement plans based on that?
• Do districts have access to data in a user-friendly and timely matter to meet the data standards?