Domain 1: Student Achievement
Standard 2: Student Learning as a Priority - Effective school leaders demonstrate that student learning is their top priority through leadership actions that build and support a learning organization focused on student success.
How do you use data? How do you close the achievement gaps?
Now that you have gathered the assessment results from various tests, including the school and individual student demographic group performance, the utilization of this data must be considered. School leaders retrieve data from their district’s data warehouse or they create their own database that has all their students’ testing data. In Broward County, school leaders have access to BASIS, Virtual Counselor, Data Warehouse, and School Reports to retrieve student test data. Using the information from Bernhardt’s research, the student learning data must be combined with other data collected from the school, i.e., student demographics, perceptions, school processes, and teacher characteristics, behavior and professional learning. Therefore, information obtained from the various data sources will be used to draw conclusions so that the school leader can make a myriad of decisions.
Effective leaders use demographic data. This type of data provides a description of the students. It includes information on race, economic status, disability, attendance, ethnicity, school enrollments, gender, grade level and native language. Leaders who look at student learning data and not consider the percentage of students in subgroups, are not effective. All in all, demographic data can help leaders determine the achievement gaps in the student learning data because they can compare the different demographic groups data. Recent changes to Florida’s School Grade Rule will help explain the impact.
Using the student learning data and demographics gives the leader only part of the picture, a consideration of the perceptions that teachers, students, and parents have regarding the school. This type of data can be gathered from questionnaires like the School Board of Broward County Customer Service Survey. The goal is to determine the beliefs of teachers, students, and parents regarding school climate. Bernhardt states that people act in congruence with what they believe, perceive, or think about a topic. Once leaders recognize the perceptions, they will need to investigate whether they are a factor in student achievement. If the perceptions of the students, parents, and teachers are affecting student achievement, then effective leaders work to change these stakeholders’ beliefs about student learning.
“Many times innovations are not put into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works, images that limit persons to familiar ways of thinking and acting (Senge, 1990; Senge & Lannon-Kim, 1991). This failure is played out in schools on a regular basis. The attitudes and beliefs of those in the school create mental models of what schooling is and how others in the school should and will respond to events and actions. It is from these attitudes and beliefs that the culture of the school is created.” (Southwest Educational Development Laboratory).
Studies have shown a correlation between low-expectancy and low-performance. Marzano states that students recognize behavioral clues that they are expected to do well or poorly academically and then behave accordingly. Subsequently, teachers must provide equal opportunities to all students to complex academic tasks despite their socioeconomic level and previous test scores.
The last piece of the picture is the teacher characteristics, behavior and professional learning. Simply put, this is what the teacher is doing in the classroom to achieve positive results in student achievement and the school processes that addresses instruction. Effective leaders compare the instructional programs and strategies, and classroom practices to student learning results to celebrate success and determine changes that are needed.
