The 3 Deadly D’s of Disappointing Data
Bad news flickers across your screen: Only 31% of your students say they enjoy coming to school. Or 71% of your teachers say they are thinking of leaving the profession or shortening their careers. Or 34% of your students report experiencing anxiety or depression related to their schooling experience. Or the nonwhite students in your school show marked differences in academic outcomes or sense of belonging compared with white students.
What do you do?
It can be painful to stare directly at these uncomfortable data points. To confront them directly would mean you have to question or reimagine much of your past work. It might mean admitting failure. It could require wholesale change, which would likely be very difficult.
But there is another way out. In fact, there are three other ways out. You could choose to engage in one of “the 3 deadly D’s of disappointing data.”
The easiest D is DENIAL. You can simply question the validity of the new information. If you can effectively discredit the research, you can avoid having to deal with it. Here are a couple examples of ways you can deny:
Question the wording of the survey questions and suggest that the people answering the questions didn’t really mean what the data suggest.
Question the creators of the survey. Maybe they have an agenda? Maybe they are not professional psychometricians? Worse yet, if the survey was created by students themselves, you could absolutely disregard the resulting data because of the creators’ lack of professional training in survey making.
If you are effective in denial, you can simply disregard the data and move on.
Another option to avoid confronting the bad news is DEFLECTION. The key to deflection is to place the blame for the bad news on someone other than yourself or your staff. If you can do this convincingly, you are absolved of responsibility for addressing the problem. Here are some great scapegoats you can use for deflection:
Parents: If students are stressed out about school, it’s their parents’ fault. They’re the ones putting pressure on kids; it’s not us.
Kids: This one is easy; just start a sentence with, “Kids these days….” You can take it from there.
Central Office: Everything would be fine if the district would get out of our way and just let schools run themselves without burdensome expectations or strategic plans.
The State: If teachers are miserable, it’s because of all the state mandates. If we could get rid of those, schools would go back to being the gardens of paradise they were before state intrusion with ESEA, or NCLB, or Common Core, or Sputnik reforms, or the Horace Mann era, or…
Society: Don’t even get me started. Social media, political animosity, the breakdown of the family. Whatever the bad news, there is always a way to blame the broader culture.
If you can deflect the problem to a cause other than the school, you can remain righteous and honorable, perhaps even a victim rather than an agential actor in the problem.
The final D, if all else fails, is DEFENSE. In this strategy, you explain all of the things you are already doing about the problem to show that you've done your due diligence. For example,
If test scores are low, you talk about the new curriculum you’ve implemented.
If student mental health looks grim, you talk about how you have developed “social emotional learning” initiatives and hired more school mental health workers.
If there are racial disparities in your academic outcomes, you talk about the efforts you’ve made to encourage nonwhite students to take AP classes.
The most complicated element of the defense strategy is that when you lift the hood, it is ultimately an acknowledgement that your best efforts, no matter how well intentioned or diligently pursued, are not working. Thus the next element of defense is to point out that other schools are also producing poor numbers. Rather than identifying great schools with impressive outcomes, just compare yourself to other schools who are also struggling in the particular domain. Basically, this strategy suggests that the results are not bad, they are just normal. Kids aren’t meant to like school. Teachers are supposed to be overwhelmed and stressed. White kids are supposed to do better than nonwhite kids…Ouch!!! Be careful of how you use this final form of defense.
Let’s face it: bad news is hard. Nobody likes to get it. But the possibility of bad news is to do some serious inquiry. We can try to find schools and teachers who are producing extraordinary results and learn from them. We can convene teams of teachers to research and analyze our data. Or best of all, we can engage our students in the process of analyzing the dispiriting data to help us develop a deeper understanding of what the data really means and how we can collectively address it.
Fear not. Bad news can be the start of a powerful journey if we can just avoid the 3 deadly D’s of disappointing data.
Note: The intent of this blog is not to suggest we shouldn’t be critical and careful consumers of data. Of course we should. Rather, the goal is to help us avoid these very human pitfalls that can prevent us from taking action when action is called for.