Each school year, one important task on a principal’s plate is to review student-achievement data to identify trends and adjust goals. However, several common misinterpretations and misuse of such data from standardized assessments can have serious consequences for teachers, staff, and families. In our own experiences in administration and school leadership research, we have seen firsthand how novice and veteran principals fall short of leveraging the valuable data from state tests.
The reality is that many principals have been socialized to use data in problematic ways. Others might work for supervisors who are misinformed on effective data use.
Some common ways we have witnessed principals misuse data include permanently labeling particular students as “low performing” and tracking them into less rigorous or remedial courses focused solely on test preparation, penalizing teachers or students for test scores without any consideration of context or growth over time, pressuring teachers to teach to the test, sharing identifiable student data on publicly displayed data walls, and ignoring factors like students’ language, disabilities, or home-life circumstances when prioritizing resources to raise student achievement.
In this biweekly column, principals and other authorities on school leadership—including researchers, education professors, district administrators, and assistant principals—offer timely and timeless advice for their peers.
These approaches to data use are harmful to school culture and teacher working conditions, and they do not support long-term sustainable improvements to student achievement. They can lead to misdiagnosing students in need of interventions or special education supports, which further undermines student morale, causing increased stress, disengagement, and dropout.
Testing companies, research centers, and researchers have long clarified that standardized tests should not be used as a sole or primary measure of student achievement, teacher effectiveness, or school quality. These scores reflect only a snapshot, not deeper learning or critical-thinking skills a student or student body might possess through engaging with high-quality curriculum and instruction.
Perhaps, most important, standardized-test scores must be understood not only as important measures of student progress but also as imperfect. What is tested and how test results are interpreted are political decisions that have implications for funding decisions, school closures, teacher evaluations, and the broader stigmatization of schools serving historically marginalized communities.
Despite these challenges, principals can effectively utilize standardized-testing data to make meaningful improvements on their campus, especially if they are educated on the appropriate uses of data.
We offer a few recommendations and reminders to principals as they dig into their achievement data with their administrative and instructional partners:
- Use standardized-test scores alongside other forms of data collected during the year, including observations of teacher lessons and student work, classroom interventions, and assessment data, as well as attendance and behavioral data. We recommend reviewing the AASA’s “Using Data to Improve Schools: What’s Working” and the National Forum on Education Statistics’ “Data Use for School and District Leaders” reports.
- Analyze data based on campus goals and student populations with teams that include diverse perspectives.
- Pinpoint strengths and areas of growth. For example, consider where students performed well and where they struggled.
- Identify students who might benefit from specific types of interventions, supports, and enrichment opportunities, including those with disabilities and English learners.
- Disaggregate data to identify and address potential disparities, particularly for students of color, students with disabilities, English learners, and students who are struggling academically.
- Plan targeted areas of professional development for all teachers, teacher teams, and individual teachers as appropriate. Both the Institute of Education Sciences and the National Association of Elementary School Principals have produced free, time-tested guides on using student-achievement data to support instructional decisionmaking.
- Determine where additional support staff is needed and adjust the master schedule to enable students to receive appropriate instruction and interventions aligned to multitiered systems of support. The CEEDAR Center’s Assessment Practices Within a Multi-Tiered System of Supports tool is one good resource.
- Develop a communication plan for sharing data with families and staff in ways that are clear, culturally responsive, and support student growth.
In our experiences, principals can create a data-informed culture that improves teaching and learning throughout the year by setting a clear vision for schoolwide data use and establishing regular data-review cycles with grade-level teams, special education personnel, and instructional coaches to analyze benchmark data and formative assessments.
Steady efforts to routinely identify students who are struggling and may benefit from Tier 2 or Tier 3 interventions based on multiple forms of data can ensure that struggling learners receive targeted support. These efforts allow principals to make short-term adjustments to professional development and resource allocations that can lead to a better school year.
We hope that recommendations presented here, while not comprehensive, can offer a good starting point for principals seeking to effectively leverage student-achievement data to improve their schools.
