Harp (center), Superintendent Birks (right) square off Monday night.
Mayor Toni Harp joined her sometime critics Monday night in questioning the schools superintendent’s request for a $144,000 data consulting contract at a time of fiscal belt-tightening.
She and the critics, from a parent advocacy group called NHPS Advocates, offered different reasons for opposing the consultancy at Monday night’s meeting in the Celentano School cafeteria: Mayor Harp (who earlier in the day raised questions about schools Superintendent Carol Birks’ budget projections) argued the money for the contract would be better spent on hiring a centralized data team. NHPS Advocates rejected the proposal altogether along with the underlying notion that student learning could be reduced to numbers.
The arguments from both sides sank the consultancy contract — at least temporarily.
The Board of Education voted to table the $144,000 contract with Harvard University’s Data Wise program. Darnell Goldson, the board’s president, said that the contract should go back through the Finance & Operations Committee for a second look before it returns to the full board in two weeks. The action took place as Superintendent Birks has warned of looming budget cuts such as school closings and teacher-position slashes.
Under the proposed contract, The Harvard Data Wise Project, which has been around since 2006, would train administrators and principals throughout New Haven in how to identify and solve problems with data, rather than letting the numbers excuse, confuse or mislead educators, Deputy Superintendent Ivelise Velazquez said.
“In a nutshell, it’s not making the decisions and then finding the data to support what you’re doing; it’s the other way around,” Velazquez explained to the Finance & Operations Committee last week. “It’s really starting with what are the issues and problems that we see, very systematically, and then using the data to uncover what we should be doing best.
“In places where there have been years of reform or places where you have put plans in place, and you’re getting the same result — which, when we look at our overall scores, it’s been like that, primarily — maybe then it isn’t that we all haven’t been working so hard and dedicating resources to this,” Velazquez continued. “It could be that our decision-making has been faulty. That’s really what’s at the heart of this: looking at data to make better decisions.”
Data Wise’s copyrighted eight-step protocol, which tells administrators to start by “organizing for collaborative work,” progress through “developing an action plan,” and finish off by “acting and assessing,” was first developed to help Boston teachers figure out how to comprehend annual state assessments.
It has since taken off among workplace coaches who have applied its lessons to run snappier meetings.
Harvard now offers a self-paced course on Data Wise for free online. Superintendent Carol Birks suggested the Board of Ed members should watch the video, near the end of their three-hour meeting on Monday — just before they tabled the agreement.
Velazquez added that Hartford had implemented the Data Wise program recently. Birks’s former boss, Superintendent Leslie Torres-Rodriguez, who promoted her to Hartford’s chief of staff in 2017, is the only coach whom Harvard has certified to teach Data Wise in Connecticut.
Team-Building Exercises
Deputy Superintendent Evie Velazquez.
According to the proposed contract, Harvard would have piloted the Data Wise program for the superintendent’s executive team, the curriculum supervisors and the staff at two school sites, Clinton Avenue and Engineering & Science University Magnet School.
In total, Data Wise would have interfaced with New Haven’s staff for only 31 hours, most of it through virtual meetings and webinars, according to the proposed scope of services. The executive team would attend a three-hour on-site retreat, followed up by 10 hour-and-a-half meetings with the individual teams.
In the end, New Haven’s own staff would put on a five-day workshop this summer for all principals and school-based teams, with guidance from the Data Wise coaches.
Couldn’t the superintendent have just assigned the online course as homework for school principals instead?
Birks told the Independent that Data Wise would be a team-building exercise, allowing teams to talk through their numbers at the same time it provided a district-wide language for incorporating data into decision-making.
“We’re in a learning organization. We can’t just say, ‘Do this,’ when people have not had the expertise,” Birks said last week. “Right now we have such variability across the district, as to our common language about ‘learner-centered problems’ and how we’re going to address them. [With Data Wise] we’re all talking the same language about data, about how we’re looking at students’ work.”
Meanwhile, the district has already invested $57,000 this school year in another data-training program, which is also being rolled out at two schools. ACES, the state-designated training center for the region, is giving the administrators at James Hillhouse and Fair Haven a primer on data-driven decision-making, as they review their curriculum and instruction.
Harp: Too Soon?
After hearing the presentation, Mayor Harp said she thought that the district was getting ahead of itself. She said she worried that New Haven hadn’t developed the infrastructure to make the training worthwhile yet. What was the point of bringing in a consultant to talk about how to use data more effectively, Harp asked, if the district isn’t really using data to begin with?
Currently, only one administrator in the central office is tasked with analyzing the district’s data: Michele Sherban, the supervisor of research, assessment and student information.
But even that task goes beyond what’s actually in her job description, Birks said, as Sherban is primarily focused on administering tests, filing grant reports and monitoring performance evaluations, not running the numbers to figure out what to change.
That lack of central office personnel puts New Haven behind other districts in the state, Birks said. “In most [school] systems, you have four or five people,” she said. Birks added that she’s been trying to hire a data analyst, but so far none of the applicants have had the right qualifications.
Mayor Harp said that, because of that lack of personnel, she wasn’t sure if a training session was the right investment. Given the “inadequate” and “shaky foundation,” Harp said that the district might not need such an “elaborate” training.
“The way in which we handle data currently really needs a lot of help. I don’t blame people for having concerns about data, because when we get it, it’s not completely filled out to the point that it’s really almost unusable,” Harp said. “Why does that matter? Because often times we are doing things that are cutting-edge in our district, but we can’t prove it. We don’t have the data that shows it.”
Harp said that she felt “very uncomfortable” voting for the $144,000 consultants if the money could instead be used to hire a data analyst who could work with Sherban. She said she also wanted to know how Birks planned to sustain the training with a steady source of funds.
Her questioning came on the same day that she took a similarly skeptical line about Superintendent Birks’ financial projections for the upcoming year’s budget, and the need to eliminate 172 teaching positions without a $10 million boost in state aid. Harp pointedly questioned Birks’ math during an appearance on her weekly “Mayor Monday” program on WNHH FM. (You can find the episode here. The portion about Birks’ projections begins around the 8‑minute mark.)
NHPS Advocates: More Than Numbers
Carol Birks: No more saying, “Just do this.”
Other parents from NHPS Advocates who testified on Monday night argued that there is more to student learning than the numbers alone could show.
Sarah Miller, a parent at Columbus Family Academy, said that data could certainly be used to inform decision-making, as she said discipline stats had done at a recent board meeting in showing the significant racial disparities that are keeping black boys out of school. But she warned that it shouldn’t take a place as “the center of everything.”
“In my experience, there is already a lot of time in schools and at Board of Education meetings invested in discussing and analyzing data. [At school meetings] leadership is barely discussed, if at all. There just isn’t time given all the data that has to be reviewed,” Miller said. “The relevance of these exercises depends on whether the data in question is worth it, the independence and accuracy of its analysis and whether the people involved are operating together on a deeper set of shared values about human development. I can’t tell you if these things are true in my children’s school or our district, because we don’t talk about them. We’re too busy talking about data.
“When data becomes the driving factor in decision-making about our children’s learning, as is effectively being proposed with Data Wise, some critical elements take a backseat, including brain science, child development, research on learning and our educators’ own ideas and direct experience,” Miller went on. “It’s important to ask whether this is how we want to invest not just our money, but time and energy when data is always on the table already and there are so many elements critical to when, why and how well our kids learn that seem all but ignored in our present decision-making.”
Even if members of NHPS Advocates accepted Data Wise’s premise, Jill Kelly, a parent at ESUMS, wanted to know if the program was actually effective. She asked if Hartford’s test scores improved after it implemented the program.
In fact, their numbers dipped, and Hartford students are still scoring lower in reading proficiency than they were three school years ago after Data Wise was first rolled out.
Ultimately, at the end of Monday’s discussion, Goldson said that he didn’t think there were enough votes for the contract to pass. A few members, including Goldson himself, didn’t explain why.
Joseph Rodriguez, the vice-chair of the Finance & Operations Committee, who had initially put the contract to the board for a vote without any recommendation, asked for it to be tabled. The motion automatically cut discussion short before it passed unanimously.
The Board of Ed also unanimously voted to approve a $132,500 curriculum audit by Curriculum Solutions, the first comprehensive look at what’s being taught in the school system in decades.