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As school districts embark on the change process, they face many barriers to the adoption of data-driven decision making. School district leaders have not embraced continuous improvement. Priorities are not clear and goals are not tied to measurable objectives. Data is not collected uniformly between organizations and over time. Outdated technology cannot be used effectively. Educators lack training to define data requirements and apply data. Stakeholders do not trust the data collected or how it will be used.

Reports need to be timely, tied to objectives, and available to people with the responsibility and ability to act on them. Data reports that show data in different ways such as tables, charts, graphs, and trends enable more people to access and understand the information. Some of the decisions that might be made with data reports include: Tracking student achievement for diagnosis and placement Changing beliefs and attitudes that all students can learn Guiding teacher professional development Linking interventions to results Using data to create school improvement plans and assess progress Allocating district resources

The IT infrastructure underpinning most data-driven decision making systems requires a significant investment in hardware, software, implementation, and maintenance.

Many professional development efforts are organized as a smorgasbord of courses offered to educators. The district measures the effort's effectiveness by how many courses staff complete or how satisfied teachers are with the classes offered. District leaders who use the smorgasbord approach may view professional development as an extra that potentially helps an individual's performance but is not absolutely essential. They probably invest little in professional development planning because they don't expect great results.

Other district leaders recognize how much professional learning contributes to the district's learning goals for students, and so they align individual, team, school, and system learning plans. At each level, participants consider what outcomes they want for students, the knowledge and skills teachers need, and the professional learning that will help staff achieve the system goals. To be results-driven means following Stephen Covey's advice (1989): "Begin with the end in mind." Once student outcomes are selected, professional development leaders identify the knowledge and skills adults need to help students achieve the district's standards of success. The knowledge and skills linked to the student learning goals become part of the comprehensive professional development curriculum

In too many schools, staff development is limited to teachers attending workshops, courses, and conferences. School districts can no longer afford staff development efforts that are predominately "adult pull-out programs." That kind of learning alone will not produce high-level results. Schools will achieve high levels of performance when professional learning is embedded in every school day.

1. If you're not using data to make decisions, you're flying blind.

2. This is all about a process, not a specific technology.

4. You will be spending more money, not less.

Online testing will require skills beyond those finely honed copying, collating and stapling skills we have acquired from our years of paper-and-pencil testing. Selecting the online assessment tool that works best for your school district can be facilitated by ensuring communication among all potential users of the application from the beginning of the selection process.

While online testing shares many of the same preparation requirements as traditional paper-based tests, they now take different forms. Rather than making sure you have enough printed copies of a test, an evaluation of the viability of online testing should involve a review of a district’s ability to provide for sufficient online access within the schedule for administration. For example, based on the number of computers and the network load, how many students can take the assessment during an exam period? Does the software restrict the number of concurrent users? Teachers likely will want the ability to create multiple forms of the test for security within the test administration. Can the application easily provide for this function?  

Further, the use of computers for online testing necessitates that students and teachers are already comfortable with using this technology as a regular part of daily instruction. Focused professional development on the usage of the application as well as what to do if things go awry will help the transition for staff. Issues to address could include what to do if a student needs to change an answer after a section of the testing is complete, how are unique log-ins provided for the students or if there is a technical problem during an administration can students resume where they were in the test.