New Report Explores Data-Driven Instruction in the Early Years

We’ve written a lot about the particular needs of teachers in the early grades, including more comprehensive teacher evaluation systems, a curriculum that spans multiple domains of learning and better support from school leaders and classroom observers. Yesterday, the New America Foundation Education Policy Program published a report that touches on another thing early-grades teachers need: good data.

The report, Promoting Data in the Classroom: Innovative State Models and Missed Opportunities, looks at the efforts of two states, Oregon and Delaware, to help teachers use student data in the classroom. Both projects provide lessons in design and implementation for other states that want to capture the data collected at the state level, typically under No Child Left Behind, and use it to improve instruction and student achievement. Given that both Oregon and Delaware used federal funds to launch their data efforts, these examples also demonstrate that Congress can do more to bring these practices to other states. But one of the biggest challenges both Oregon and Delaware face is how to use data in kindergarten, first grade and second grade – those years left out of the NCLB accountability testing system.

The Oregon DATA Project originated from the state’s 2007 application for a federal Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems grant. The DATA Project operates as a voluntary, grassroots program. The project’s leader, working with other volunteer leaders from around the state, designed a training program for school leaders and teachers. Once certified, these “data coaches” take their skills back to local schools, where they work in small-group meetings of teachers and administrators, during the regular workday, to demonstrate data analysis skills and show teachers how to apply their findings to the classroom.

According to DATA Project leader Mickey Garrison, Oregon elementary school teachers were among the first to join the campaign for data in the classroom, with middle and high school teachers initially more skeptical. Garrison noted that early grade teachers are actually more skilled in assessment than many other teachers, because they have always had to assess learning without the availability of annual state standardized tests. Oregon education officials are beginning to develop standardized metrics for K-2 students, as well, including a kindergarten entry assessment. In the meantime, some districts are using the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) or the easyCBM literacy and math assessments for young children, or developing their own interim measures and assessments.

The Delaware Data Coach Program has been more top-down than grassroots. Included as an $8 million portion of the state’s $19 million Race to the Top grant, Delaware hired professional data coaches through an outside company. Every school district and core subject teacher from grades 2 through 12 is required to participate in the program, and the project’s director, Donna Mitchell, noted in an interview that even kindergarten and first grade teachers have opted to participate. (Delaware administers a state standardized exam in second grade, explaining why the state extended the data coach program as far down as grade 2.)

Delaware’s early grade teachers are using student growth objectives and other assessments designed internally or by external groups to collect student data. The state is also developing other assessments, and uses a within-year growth measure to evaluate teachers in the early years. (For many more details, see Early Education Initiative Senior Policy Analyst Laura Bornfreund’s policy paper, An Ocean of Unknowns: Risks and Opportunities in Using Student Achievement Data to Evaluate PreK-3^rd Grade Teachers).

Oregon and Delaware are both working to expand their data projects to early grade teachers, but neither state was especially prepared to serve those teachers just a few years ago.  Our paper recommends that Congress offer explicit incentives to states to produce projects like these. In doing so, lawmakers should take these teachers’ distinct needs into consideration: States first need good data if teachers are to use those data in the classroom to help children learn.