Performance-Driven Education in the Classroom

At the beginning of the 2010-2011 school year, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation set out to better understand the role of performance-driven education in Charlotte-Mecklenburg (CMS)  classrooms; to examine teachers’ cultural, behavioral and procedural shifts in response to the transition to more data intensive instructional models; to study the importance of capacity building and stakeholder engagement in the context of the district wide transition to performance-driven education; and to share the lessons learned about ways of supporting teachers in effective use of student data. We took a documentary-style approach to examining attitudes and classroom data practices among eleven different teachers in five different schools.

During the course of our research, we saw both frustration and renewed inspiration among educators. Overall, CMS has managed to create an educational culture in which teachers and administrators alike embrace data in the richest sense.

Watch the videos below to learn more about how teachers and administrators use data to improve student and school performance.

Download the written case study here.