Mike Schmoker warned the 400 area teachers and administrators gathered at the McCamly Plaza Hotel today of the bombshell he was about to drop.

“This is pretty brutal stuff, so ... are you all sitting down?” Schmoker, a nationally recognized educational consultant, asked. “Effective teaching is not happening in a majority of classrooms.”

Schmoker’s indictment of the current state of education provided a fitting backdrop to the Calhoun Intermediate School District ’s latest conference on student data.

Funded by a $1.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education, the Data for Student Success program was launched in the fall of 2006 with the goal of gathering and condensing data sets like standardized test scores into reports for educators.

Last spring, the CISD — working with the Barry, Branch, Clinton, Eastern Upper Peninsula, Gratiot-Isabella, Jackson, Macomb and Shiawassee school districts — added a professional development component so area teachers could learn to use the developing online data reports.

Becky Rocho, the Calhoun Intermediate School District ’s assistant superintendent for general services and legislation, said the push to connect data to school strategy was a response to Schmoker’s contention that many teachers were failing their students by eschewing collaboration and avoiding time-consuming analysis activities.

“Mike’s saying that if we’re not doing anything different in the classroom, we’re not going to get different results,” she said.

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Source: The Battle Creek Enquirer, 3.6.08