"For years and years, our school district did the innovation "du jour." One year it was a new math program. The next year it was a new science pro-gram. We measured our success by how much we had done. And yet we had no idea what, if any-thing, was making a difference in student learning. Now we have a set of clearly defined learning goals for all students. We choose approaches that we think will help us meet those goals. We keep checking whether we are getting there or not by analyzing student learnng results. We're not shooting in the dark any more." -- a teacher
School districts like the one in the example above are taking a different approach to school change. They are collecting and analyzing school data to help them set clear goals for student achievement and define a process for evaluating success in meeting those goals. It is an approach that the Regional Alliance supports and encourages through its Systemic Reform Handbook.
Prepared by the Alliance and based on the work of educational researchers and practitioners, the Handbook provides a comprehensive program for change. It is written for school and district teams actively involved in mathematics and science education reform.
The first section of the Handbook, which will be published in the fall of 1997, details a change process that begins and ends with student learning and encourages educators to use data in every step of the process. Data on student achievement, demographics, enrollment, resources, school environment, etc., can help schools determine what students are learning and why. It can guide schools to set explicit goals for improving student achievement, take action, monitor progress, and adjust plans based on the data they are collecting.
The Handbook focuses on assessing and improving student learning for all. This means that as schools monitor their progress they are looking at not only what programs are achieving results but also who is benefiting from the changes. Chapter 3 of the handbook offers ways to keep equity issues at the forefront of a school's reform plans so that initiatives create equal learning opportunities and result in high levels of achievement for all students regardless of class, race, national origin, or gender. The chapter defines a process in which schools look carefully at their data on student achievement to see if all students are succeeding and meeting the new performance standards. It then