Current School Improvement systems are operating with many of the right principles:

• Access to extensive data dashboards
• Professional coaches and peer support

However, there is a reason that school improvement efforts, despite significant funding and a sense of urgency, have failed to make large-scale systemic improvements. There is a fatal flaw in all school improvement systems that is impossible to overcome – they use the wrong data.

School improvement is positioned as a “data driven” practice. Virtually every school and school improvement process in the country touts data use when describing how they “do” school improvement. Yet a simple reality check shows why these “data driven” practices do not get expected results.

• The lever of change in schools, the variable that actually can have an impact, are the practices of adults.
• The data systems being used are, almost exclusively, generated by the performance of students.

Student data is not actionable to improve the practices of adults.

Practia offers a paradigm shift, both a new type of data system and an updated way of using this data system.

• In order to improve adult practices, we need to collect and display data on these adult practices.
• Coaches then need to use that data to help adults in the schools improve their practices.
• Schools need to use that data to properly align resources.
• This data must be collected and made available immediately and frequently, on an ongoing basis.
• The data is used to guide coaching and to monitor the progress of adult practices.

With Practia, student assessments are still essential, but they serve a fundamentally different purpose – student assessment data is used to evaluate the effectiveness of the adult improvements.