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The popular term for what's going on in the Richmond School District and other school systems throughout the region is data-driven decision making. How that plays out varies from school district to school district, from weekly meetings and annual data retreats to regular standardized assessments of student performance. What it means is educators are getting more scientific in how they approach teaching and learning in today's schools.

Use of the data for instruction is still in its infancy, according to Laura Maly, a math instructional coach who works with teachers at Bradley Tech and Pulaski high schools on applying the benchmark assessments to their classroom work. But she's optimistic that the more teachers learn about what information is available to them on their students, the greater impact it will have.

One of the main obstacles that schools say they face in taking advantage of the plethora of information available to them in the technological age is finding time for teachers to study their students' academic performance on objective measures and plan ways to address any shortcomings. In the Oconomowoc School District, each school has held a "data day" for staff before the start of school for the last four years. The Wauwatosa School District is experimenting in several schools with having teachers gather to figure out how to take information from the MAP test and apply it in their classrooms.

The five assessment areas are: student achievement, which could include success on state tests and graduation rates; school operations, which could include teacher vacancies, class sizes and serious incidents; constituent satisfaction, which will look at results of student, parent and teacher surveys; school-selected indicators, which could include the percentage of students passing advanced classes, for example; and extra credit, which would be improvement in areas identified as challenging, such as increasing the number of students in the advanced category on the state's math and reading test.