If you're at all involved in the field of public education, I'm willing to bet you've heard these words:
Data. Driven. Instruction.
Essentially it means adjusting your practice to reflect "real-time" data that is collected on a weekly (if not daily) basis.
Now, as a biologist, I'm all for testing hypotheses. Yes, we need an objective way to determine weather or not our instructional methods are effective. Absolutely, we should have some means of telling weather perception and reality are in line with one another. But, in my (yes, limited) experience, data driven instruction has proven itself to be a fools errand. And here's why:
1. It takes a lot of friggin' time
Look, I'm a first year teacher. I'm developing a year's worth of curriculum, grading papers, managing behavior, calling parents, making Powerpoints, holding detentions, sponsoring extra-curriculars, attending staff meetings, crafting worksheets--you get the point. Add to that list the task of meticulously collecting reliable data on my students? It's honestly not going to happen. Hire me an assistant. I already feel like my head is spinning from all the fires I have to put out.
2. Teachers fail to isolate variables
So imagine I get my act together, and I have this nice set of multiple-choice, standard-aligned questions ready to roll out. Guess what? If my students can't comprehend the passage the questions are associated with, we're not really testing skills anymore, are we? The more I teach, the more I believe that all standardized tests (the ACT, the SAT, AP tests, TNRead, et cetera) are just literacy tests. How fluent are your students in Standard Written English? If the answer is "not very," then they probably won't do well. If you REALLY want to test skills, test students at their own lexile level or just above.
3. Differentiation is impossible
No really though. Refer back to my To Do list. I have 20-30 students in my class, each of whom possesses a unique combination of needs, gifts, and knowledge gaps. A single human being cannot be responsible for assessing each student and tailoring a customized education plan for each one. I cannot make twenty-five sets of guided notes (Actually, I can really barely make two). But here's the thing: a computer can.
My question, at the end of the day, is why hasn't urban education evolved to incorporate technological advances in a meaningful way? If my computer can auto-translate a facebook status written in Korean, why can't we give students a curriculum that allows them to read at their Lexile level and grow at their own pace? Why do we continue to offer a "one-size-fits-all" education to our kids?
We've all read the data on holding kids back--it doesn't help. But the alternative can't be pushing them through the system at the same pace as their at-grade-level peers. As teachers, especially high school teachers, we simply don't have enough hours in the day to prepare for the various skill-sets our kids come to us with.
