The Data Dance

Data is dumb. One of Webster's definitions of dumb is..."markedly lacking in intelligence: exasperatingly obtuse". Exactly. Data is exasperatingly obtuse when it does not present the true picture...the whole story, as it were. Since I will never, ever be an administrator in this district or in any other district, I can challenge data with impunity. I am not obligated to be loyal to district data.

For many teachers, data is a series of numbers thrown at them when a district is not sure what to do about students or a particular problem. Data becomes offensive when it is held up to be the whole truth. District data is something which can be manipulated any way to prove something that a district wants proved. Data is often about funding and making officials look good. Case in point...at a staff meeting last week, each of us was handed a sheet of statistics from the school year 2008-09. Test scores in the fields of math, English language arts and social studies were neatly printed in blue and yellow boxes with highlighted areas under the title of accountability status. What does accountability status mean anyway? Terms like accountability status are so vague. Data dancing.

Another term in those blue and yellow boxes is "Suspension Instances". That title is an example of what I call "data dumb down". "Instances" (which sounds harmless), mean multiple days in which well-educated and well-meaning teachers stop teaching to deal with unruly students who will not or can not learn. These students disrupt the educational process for all the other children who want to learn but can not because the rights of the disruptive students are deemed more important than all the other students. Teachers suffer extreme frustration and sometimes physical assault. "Instances", no matter how extreme, often happen multiple times before a student is removed from a classroom. Anger and frustration build and districts eventually lose excellent teachers who leave the profession or move to different districts. The attentive students left behind in the classroom miss countless hours of school due to disruptions. Data is NOT the whole story.

In 2005-06, our school had 310 short term suspensions and 28 long term suspensions. Jump ahead three years. In 2008-09, our school had 0 short term suspensions and only 1 long term suspension. Viewed by the outsider, this suspension information looks great. Viewed by teachers and administrators, this information looks very different. Why? Our new district superintendent disallows any and all suspensions in the city district. Period. End of story. Removing dangerous and disturbed and unruly students from the building "takes away their right to an education". One might say those students already surrendered some of their educational rights by refusing to learn and cooperate in the classroom. However, those students are not suspended but are thrown into the spin cycle which is the ATS room or (alternate to suspension).

ATS rooms (a.k.a "holding bins") are locations in the school where students are monitored and held. Even at the elementary level, these ATS rooms can be extremely difficult to maintain well. When students are profoundly disturbed, angry or determined to act out, location does not make much difference. They are not in a right frame of mind to learn, whether they are at home, on the streets or at school. At the high school level, ATS rooms become dangerous places when rival gang members sometimes end up together in the same space.

Perhaps in time, the district will figure out better and safer ways to monitor ATS rooms. Perhaps suspensions will be less because the students are different, not because the data is fudged. The data dance continues but many teachers choose to sit out.