Data Driven Leadership in Absence of Data
Mark E Shanoff, Ed. D President, Florida Association of School Administrators Principal, Ocoee Middle School Currently, the students, teachers and school leaders in Florida are leading their schools without the standardized assessment data we have become accustomed to in years past. What’s worse is when the data is eventually released, the validity of the data has been called into question by practitioners and leaders from across the State. And, once the data is released in January, more instructional time will have passed since the students took the exam than instructional time exists before the next round of FSA testing. It used to be that the politics surrounding student assessment, albeit distracting, didn’t impact the planning and delivery of an instructional program based on the previous year’s data. In fact, school leaders relied on that data, to make placement decisions and lineup changes. But today, the politics of student assessment and the absence of any actionabl