Two minutes and thirty-three seconds later, eight-year-old Dante Williams slammed down his pencil, shot his hand into the air, and twitched impatiently as the teacher scribbled his finish time at the top of the multiplication quiz. Then Dante was out of his chair and flying through the door of his third-grade classroom, arms pumping as he speed-walked down the hallway, his worksheet creased in his fist.
Three years earlier, in 2007, when Dante entered kindergarten, South Avondale had been ranked as one of the worst schools in Cincinnati—which, given that the city had some of the lowest scores in the state, meant that the school was among the worst in Ohio. That year, South Avondale’s students had fared so poorly on their assessment exams that officials declared the school an “academic emergency.” Just weeks before Dante had stepped onto campus for the first time, a teenager had been murdered—one bullet to the head, one in the back—right next to South Avondale during a football tournament billed as a “Peace Bowl.” That crime, combined with the school’s deep dysfunctions, poor academic scores, and a general sense that South Avondale had problems too big for anyone to solve, had caused city officials to ask if the board of education should close the campus altogether. The question, however, was where would they send Dante and his classmates? Nearby schools had scored only slightly better on assessment exams, and if those classrooms were forced to absorb additional kids, they would likely fall apart as well.
The community around South Avondale had been poor for decades. There were race riots in the 1960s, and when the city’s factories started closing in the ’70s, the area’s unemployment had skyrocketed. South Avondale administrators saw students coming to school malnourished and with marks of abuse. In the 1980s, the drug trade around the school exploded and never really let up. At times, the violence got so bad that police would patrol the campus’s perimeter while classes were in session. “It could be a pretty scary place,” said Yzvetta Macon, who was principal from 2009 to 2013. “Students didn’t go to South Avondale unless there was no other place to go.”
One thing that wasn’t a problem, however, was resources. The city of Cincinnati had poured millions of dollars into South Avondale. Local companies such as Procter & Gamble built computer labs and paid for tutoring and sports programs. In an effort to address the school’s shortcomings, city officials spent nearly three times as many dollars on every South Avondale student as they did on students in more affluent communities, such as at the public Montessori campus across town. South Avondale had energetic teachers, devoted librarians and tutors, reading specialists, and guidance counselors who were trained in early childhood education and prepared to help parents sign up for state and federal assistance programs.
The school also used sophisticated software to track students’ performance. Administrators had embraced data collection and Cincinnati Public Schools had created an individual website for every South Avondale student—a dashboard of information that detailed kids’ attendance, test scores, homework, and classroom participation—that was accessible to parents and educators so they could track who was improving and who was falling behind. The school’s faculty received a steady stream of memos and spreadsheets showing how each pupil had fared over the past week, month, and year. South Avondale, in fact, was at the forefront of educational Big Data. “K–12 schools should have a clear strategy for developing a data-driven culture,” read a U.S. Department of Education report that helped guide Cincinnati’s efforts. By studying each student’s statistics closely enough, educators believed they could deliver the specific kind of assistance each kid needed most.
“Any idea or new program, we signed up for,” said Elizabeth Holtzapple, director of research and evaluation at Cincinnati Public Schools. “We had seen how data and analytics had turned around other districts, and we were on board.”
The turnaround at South Avondale, however, was nowhere to be found. Six years after the online dashboards were introduced, more than 90 percent of South Avondale’s teachers admitted they hardly ever looked at them—or used the data sent by the district, or read the memos they received each week. In 2008, 63 percent of South Avondale’s third graders failed to meet the state’s basic educational benchmarks.
So that year, Cincinnati decided to try something different. The district’s top officials targeted South Avondale and fifteen other low-performing campuses in what became known as the “Elementary Initiative,” or EI. The effort was perhaps most notable for what it lacked: The schools were given no additional funds or supplementary teachers; there were no new tutoring sessions or after-school programs; the staff and student body at each campus remained basically the same.
Instead, the EI focused on changing how teachers made decisions in their classrooms. The reforms were built around the idea that data can be transformative, but only if people know how to use it. To change students’ lives, educators had to understand how to transform all the spreadsheets and statistics and online dashboards into insights and plans. They had to be forced to interact with data until it influenced how they behaved.
By the time Dante entered the third grade, two years after the EI started, the program was already so successful it was hailed by the White House as a model of inner-city reform. South Avondale’s test scores went up so much that the school earned an “excellent” rating from state officials. By the end of Dante’s third-grade year, 80 percent of his classmates were reading at grade level; 84 percent passed the state math exam. The school had quadrupled the number of students meeting the state’s guidelines. “South Avondale drastically improved student academic performance in the 2010–11 academic year and changed the culture of the school,” a review by the school district read. The school’s transformation was so startling that researchers from around the nation soon began traveling to Cincinnati to figure out what the Elementary Initiative was doing right.
When those researchers visited South Avondale, teachers told them that the most important ingredient in the schools’ turnaround was data—the same data, in fact, that the district had been collecting for years. Teachers said that a “data-driven culture” had actually transformed how they made classroom decisions.
When pressed, however, those teachers also said they rarely looked at the online dashboards or memos or spreadsheets the central office sent around. In fact, the EI was succeeding because teachers had been ordered to set aside those slick data tools and fancy software—and were told instead to start manipulating information by hand.
Each school, under orders from the central office, had established a “data room”—in some cases, an empty conference room, in others, a large closet that had previously contained cleaning supplies—where teachers had to transcribe test scores onto index cards. They were told to draw graphs on butcher paper that was taped to walls. They ran impromptu experiments—Do test scores improve if kids are placed in smaller reading groups? What happens when teachers trade off classes?—and then scribbled the results onto whiteboards. Rather than simply receiving information, teachers were forced to engage with it. The EI had worked because instead of passively absorbing data, teachers made it “disfluent”—harder to process at first, but stickier once it was really understood. By scribbling out statistics and testing preconceptions, teachers had figured out how to use all the information they were receiving. The Elementary Initiative, paradoxically, had made data more cumbersome to absorb—but more useful. And from those index cards and hand-drawn graphs, better classrooms emerged.
“Something special happened inside those data rooms,” said Macon, the principal. South Avondale improved not because teachers had more information but because they learned how to understand it. “With Google and the Internet and all the information we have now, you can find answers to almost anything in seconds,” said Macon. “But South Avondale shows there’s a difference between finding an answer and understanding what it means.”
II.