EDITOR'S CYBERCHAIR

Last month, SchoolNet, at the Hudson Hotel in NY (President Clinton's favorite watering hole, according to Vanity Fair) with the participation of e-Scholar, Microsoft and Intel, sponsored the first in what promises to be an annual EduStat Summit. Our choice of titles - and venues - was not an idle one. Just as New York is SchoolNet's home, NY is home to one of the most sweeping organizational transformations in modern history: Comstat (or Compstat or Compustat, depending on your preferences.)

What is Comstat? An NYPD special: the use of computer-based data to drive decision making. With it, New York's finest has learned to pin-point hot spots and redeploy resources in warp time; the result? Radical decreases in crime, throughout New York and in every other jurisdiction in which it has been tried. For obvious reasons, I don't want to push the crime and education analogy too far; teachers are not police officers (though good cops are teachers). What is important is that the organizational implications are the same for schools and police precincts. Know your terrain, set goals, analyze problems, frame solutions, deploy resources - both financial and human - and organizational goals and behavior change. And when they change, outcomes change. For the better.

As nothing succeeds like success, so too data-driven decision-making. In the police example, the argument was an old one. On one side were proponents of the root causes theory: crime could be controlled only when root causes were successfully attacked. End poverty, racism, ignorance, illness, hunger, child abuse, broken homes. Alcohol and drug abuse -- you name it - and crime would begin to disappear.

On the other side of the debate, sociologists like James Q. Wilson and police Chiefs like NY City's Bratten didn't agree; they thought the root causes argument was tantamount to admitting defeat. To the contrary, they argued that crime could be controlled and reduced by effective, selective policing. Install high intensity lights in crime-infested areas and crime would go down. Wilson and Bratten believed that while some crime might move into the shadows, the absolute rate would decrease. Treat the symptoms and crime rates would fall. Indeed, there was a win-win dimension to this approach. Go after fare-beaters in the subway and not only would fare-beating decrease, even disappear, public confidence in the subways would increase.

This is not to say that root causes should not be attacked; they should, on moral grounds alone, but they are not the sole cause of criminal behavior. Indeed, the root causes argument comes perilously close to discounting the hard and honorable work of less fortunate people who play by the rules. In the final analysis, a failure to fight crime aggressively is itself an enabler if not a root cause.

The parallel with schools needs little elaboration. To be sure, poverty, hunger, disease, drug abuse are all painful attributes of the lives of far too many children but they cannot be used as excuses for education failure. That's blaming the victim. As John Murphy, former superintendent of Charlotte Mecklenburg's schools used to say, parents aren't keeping their best kids at home; they're sending us the best they've got. And while a powerful case can be made for a national children's policy - one with which educators could make common cause - it is sobering to remember that it was the education community that took the "E" out of HEW. (One of President Jimmy Carter's first acts was to honor his solemn pledge to the NEA, stripping HEW of it education responsibilities. Interestingly, a quintessential root causes program, Head Start, was left with the new HHS).

It is no coincidence, of course, that both institutions - the modern police department and the modern public school - were forged in the industrial and agrarian eras of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and reflect their origins. Built on a factory model with farming calendar they are institutions badly out of synch with the post-industrial, high tech society of which they are a part. Enter IT, information technology. IT is transforming. It changes every thing it touches, from business to entertainment to police work to education.

And it gives new meaning to the old truism: every organization is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. Do you want school systems that have drop-out rates approaching fifty per cent? Do whatever urban school districts do that achieve this unenviable objective. Do you want schools that have high graduation rates - and high levels of academic achievement - emulate districts that do.

This is what the NYPD did: each precinct in NY City was able to develop profiles that reflected crime rates - by type of crime - by neighborhood in real time. Accurate description - as distinct from denial - is the first step. Careful analysis is the second. Reallocating resources from low need to high need areas is third. Lowering the boom is fourth. Lasting change is fifth.

In the world of law enforcement, ending fare-beating in the subway system and squeegee men at the toll plazas was the first step; it showed the public that the police cared, were prepared to act and could control highly visible crime. Policing - the thin blue line -- makes a difference. In the world of education, attending to the needs of low performing youngsters - and getting achievement gains - reminds us that schooling makes a difference.

The conference opened with a video greeting from Education Secretary Rod Paige, commending the conferees on their tasks and inviting them to report to him upon the conclusion of their deliberations.

In addition to three distinguished panels, the EduStat Summit was joined by Sandy Kress, one of the principal architects of NCLB. A Texan of unusual discernment - he had the wit and wisdom to attend U. C. Berkeley, my alma mater -- he practices law in Austin TX where he is a partner in Akin Gump. As a resident of Houston - several years ago - Sandy, a liberal democrat, became concerned about the quality of TX public schools and followed the education reforms of then Governor George W. Bush with intense interest. In a bipartisan and public spirited manner which we have all profited from, Sandy quickly became both an advocate of Mr. Bush's education reform ideas and an advisor to him.

Friday's lead-off speaker was none other than NY's own Chancellor Joel Klein, one-time prosecutor of the Microsoft anti-trust case, perfect preparation for dealing with the biggest school monopoly in the nation.

The closing speaker was DoE technology guru Susan Patrick.

What to make of a gathering of this kind? There has been a quantum shift over the past half-decade in attitudes toward education, how its performance should be measured and what impact that measurement will have on both policy and practice. We have moved from a feel good regime to a do good regime, a welcome and long overdue change. Having said that there remains ample room for fine-tuning and course-correction. Among the rank-and-file anxiety about data-driven decision-making remains high. And in fairness to educators, for many data is something a third-party requires you to gather about yourself so you can be embarrassed with it several months later. That characterization only slightly exaggerates.

But the fact remains, data in a compliance regime is not the same as data in a school improvement regime, and we are - haltingly to be sure - making the culture shift from one to the other.

Denis P Doyle
Issue 4.28, no 86
07/07/2004
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