When 19 Heads Are Better Than One

By Kathryn Parker Boudett, Elizabeth A. City, & Richard J. Murnane

How can educators use the piles of student-assessment results that land on their desks to improve learning in their schools? Two years ago, a group of school leaders from the Boston public schools and faculty members and doctoral students from Harvard University’s graduate school of education agreed to meet monthly to wrestle with this topic. ( "Harvard, Boston Educators Team Up on Test-Data Book," April 27, 2005.) We began with a somewhat vague notion of producing a book that would help teachers and administrators take the high road in responding to student-assessment results—improve instruction, rather than engage in “drill and kill.” We guessed that 19 heads would be better than one in producing such a book.

In our first year, we floundered. We were a collection of polite professionals who did our best to take time from our busy schedules to talk about using data in schools. We read each other’s musings on the topic of the day and then spent many meetings trying to outline a book that would compile our respective contributions. Each of us learned something, but by the end of the year it was not clear “we” had made much progress toward our collective goal.

In our second year, everything changed. We identified three editors, who proposed reorienting the book. We scrapped the original idea of a collection of chapters about various relevant topics. The new focus would be addressing what our target audience—we identified it as school leaders, broadly defined—needed to know and be able to do in order to use data effectively. We found a publisher, who then convinced us to adopt an extremely aggressive deadline. Perhaps most important, we created a very deliberate process for involving everyone in...