Reflecting on last week’s reflections, I can’t help but think of a line from The Cold War Kids , “Something is not right with me. How was I supposed to know?”  If something is not right, say in our school/district, how do we know?  This is a questions many administrators struggle with.  They receive the test data, perhaps from the state.  Like below data from the school highlighted in the Sara Armstrong  Edutopia article.

The data, for the most part shows positive gains, but what good does this do?  The results come after the fact. The students have moved on.  If the data had trended south, you again know too late to do anything about it.  This is  why every school needs proper assessments in-place that support actual learning, not measure an end of year goal.

Full disclosure here, I work for Discovery Education which has an assessment service, Discovery Education Assessment.  That said, even though  I do think that the Discovery Education service is the best because of the easy tie-ins back to content, not all districts will want to purchase it.  Please purchase something.  Something that will give your teachers, administrators and students the data to make decisions.  Decisions on what content is needed, what type of professional development should be delivered and what initiatives are making a difference.  Without this real-time data, you are driving the bus blind.