Making Truth Less Subjective

Abstract

SOMETIMES on days when I feel as though I've taken 20 difficult phone calls, I look back at my documentation and find it was really only five. Sometimes when teachers feel that the majority of their students have moved and been replaced by others, they later look at the numbers and find the turnover was only 15%. Sometimes principals feel as though they've spent many hours in classrooms, but when they begin documenting their observations, they've spent less than 5% of their time there. As Mark Twain said, man's private thought can never be a lie; what he thinks, is to him the truth, always.1 That's why having data available is so important. It can improve upon our personal perceptions. Admittedly, statistics can sometimes be skewed to tell whatever story their handlers want them to tell, but by and large, high-quality data allow us to step back from personal perceptions and embark on an analysis with an eye toward identifying the root cause of a problem, the worthlessness of one current solution, or the value of another. Take the Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) in North Carolina, for example. Quality Matters 2004: A Wake Community Review of the Public's Schools is the latest edition of an annual review of WCPSS that seeks to inform the community by providing an independent analysis of the finances and operations of the system. (This publication is a separate entity from the mandated card produced by the district.) Business, civic, and community leaders have joined together as the School Finance Committee to evaluate the school system, its stewardship of taxpayer money, and the return on citizen investment it provides. Impact of Performance The committee spent more than nine months analyzing the spending and performance of the school system. Members were interested in economic impact, noting that a community's economic growth can be measured by identifying lost opportunities and recognizing positive achievement. So they looked at the impact of high school dropouts on Wake County's economy. Referencing the estimate that over a lifetime a high school graduate will earn $280,000 more than a high school dropout,2 they determined that the economic cost of dropouts in Wake County is staggering, and it repeats itself every year. By this measure, claims the report, the 791 ninth- through 12th-grade students in Wake County who dropped out of high school in 2002-03 surrendered approximately $221.5 million in lifetime earning potential. Advanced Placement Data Quality Matters 2004 recognizes that Wake County continues to surpass neighboring school districts in the percentage of students scoring 3 or higher, on a scale of 1 to 5, on Advanced Placement (AP) exams and that the number of AP exams taken has continued to climb, too. However, the committee claims, the analysis cannot stop here. As discussed in previous editions of Quality Matters, racial disparities in AP classrooms remain a problem. Whites and Asians are still overrepresented in AP classes in relation to their share of all 11th- and 12th-grade students, while blacks and Hispanics are underrepresented. In addition, the report claims that overall AP course participation in Wake County is rather low: less than 32% of Wake's juniors and seniors took AP classes in 2001-02, and only 19.7% took one or more AP exams. Though the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) may have a lower percentage of students scoring a 3 or higher on the exams, that district's participation is more than twice that of Wake County, with over 40% of CMS juniors and seniors taking one or more AP exams. The committee stresses that WCPSS must continue to investigate the reasons for these disparities (e.g., lack of sufficient guidance, cost of AP exams) and provide mechanisms for more high school students to enroll in AP courses. WCPSS' longstanding commitment to academic excellence, they say, requires nothing less. The committee also looked at how many and which teachers leave the district, finding it especially alarming that many teachers who leave are tenured (i. …