So many administrators I work with spend more time staring into spreadsheets than watching teachers and students in action.
A spreadsheet will never solve your problem.
It’s like that mirror in Harry Potter. You can stare at your data forever. It gives you glimpses of your deepest desires.
But real life passes you by.
I worked under an administrator named Dr. Spreadsheet. They’d call us in every year, holding a big grid of green with a bit of orange.
Dr. Spreadsheet knew one thing about education: “Green good. Orange bad.”
And every year we’d debrief the same quarterly test.
And every year the same box was a bad color.
We’d remind her that, yeah, this test only has three questions that correspond to that box. Students miss one question and the box turns orange. We can’t do much with that data.
Dr. Spreadsheet pressed on. Orange is, after all, bad.
“Well,” we’d explain, “one of those three questions is terrible. The only students who get it right actually have the lowest overall scores. And the teachers all tried that question and we all got it wrong, too.”
The question in question is seared into my brain:
Which word is “flair” most like?
a) talent
b) torch
c) a piece of clothing
I don’t remember the fourth option, but no one picked it.
- “Torch” was an attempt to confuse students with “flair vs flare.” No one fell for that.
- Everyone picked “flair” because we interpreted a “flair” as a fancy button or ribbon.
- But the answer was “talent.”
So first, other than saying “flair for design,” I’ve never heard “flair” used in place of “talent.”
But, the question itself had no context! Put “flair” in a sentence!
And the word “flair” was not in our reading program (which is where the test came from). It’s not like we were supposed to teach this one random word.
It was just a terrible question.
The bad, orange box told us nothing.
But Dr. Spreadsheet could NOT bring themselves to admit this. Because it would mean the entire spreadsheet, and, in fact, all spreadsheets are lies.
“Well, maybe some students take an after school vocabulary class,” Dr. Spreadsheet offered.
I kid you not.
I’ll let you guess how much respect we had for Dr. Spreadsheet.
Any data you’re looking at requires context. You must dig into the actual questions that the data is struggling to represent. You have to look at the students’ responses.
As Mark Twain told us, there are three types of lies. “Statistics” is one of them. Yet so many edu-bosses rely solely on statistics.
If you’re in a leadership position, get your head out of the spreadsheet and into classrooms.
That’s where you’ll gain actually useful information.
And it’s where you’ll gain the respect of your teachers.