The Last Mile Problem - Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication - page 14

provide ongoing professional development, it appeared that principals and
teachers stopped using the system. The School Board members pressed the
district about the functionality of the system by asking such questions as: Is
this a technological problem? Does your team not have the required staff to keep
things running? Other than the data coaches, has anything else changed in the
system since last year when most of the schools seemed to be using the data? The
district team responded that the data system not only functioned properly,
but that it also had been improved to allow principals and teachers access to
more reports and greater tools to help them explore and visualize the data.
“The system is way better now that we're working with the IT department,”
the leader of the department commented. “We're constantly updating what
school personnel can do with it—the reports they can access, the tools they
can use. We've made sure to send out weekly e-mails with all the changes and
with reports that we believe are most useful. But we hear back from only a
few who are really tech savvy and love data. We don't understand why the
rest aren't using the system. It's clear that they don't like something about
the system. They just never tell us what it is!”
As part of its presentation, the team provided information from a survey given
to a random sample of schools in the district. The results were discouraging.
Less than 10 percent mentioned using the system “regularly,” and approxi-
mately 55 percent marked “never.” Follow-up survey questions that explored
the reasons for nonuse noted that a large majority of principals and teachers
felt that the data systems and reports were “too complicated” to use. In addi-
tion, they felt that the district provided “too much information” and only 25
percent agreed that they provided “the right kind” of information.
After presenting the survey results, a group of teachers and principals that
had been invited to the meeting were given time to discuss their experiences
and answer questions. Their comments were revealing:
One principal said: “I don't have time to open every e-mail I receive from the
data office. And when I do, it seems like they're always changing the format.
Sometimes it's a PDF, other times I have to open them in Excel.”
A teacher offered: “Half of the reports we get aren't even relevant to my school
context and my student population.”
Another teacher asked: “How am I supposed to use teacher value-added infor-
mation when I don't even understand how they calculate it?”
A principal commented: “They're always changing how they do things. Some
days I get on and find what I'm looking for, but then I go back a few days later