Some administrators I work with spend more time staring at spreadsheets than they do 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.
Dr. Spreadsheet
I worked under an administrator named Dr. Spreadsheet (just kidding). They’d call us in every year, holding a big grid. It was mostly green with a bit of orange.
Dr. Spreadsheet knew one thing: “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 go with that box. Students miss one question and the box turns orange. It’s not enough information to do anything with.
But Dr. Spreadsheet pressed on. Orange is, after all, bad.
The Awful Question
“Well,” we’d explain (again), “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.”
This one question is seared into my brain over a decade later:
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.” Few students 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,” when do we use “flair” to mean “talent”? (A) was simply not a clearly better answer than (C).
Further, the question itself had no context. We have to put “flair” in a sentence so that students can use their reading skills.
Plus, 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 all around.
The bad, orange box told us nothing.
The Spreadsheet Was A Lie
But Dr. Spreadsheet could NOT bring themselves to admit any of this. She did not relent. 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.
Data Requires Context
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 out of the spreadsheets and into classrooms.
That’s where you’ll get the actually useful information.