Prince George's County, Maryland Priority Schools unfurl systemic possibilities through inquiry: the application and implications of Data Wise in an urban setting

Abstract

Serving approximately 125,000 students, Maryland’s Prince George’s County Public School System, like many urban systems, has undergone frequent and relatively rapid leadership transitions, filling the system with partially implemented initiatives that are often misunderstood. After the County Executive appointed a new Board of Education Chair, Vice Chair, and Chief Executive Officer of Schools in 2014, the CEO began assembling a team to set the district on a path to improve practice and create better opportunities for everyone to learn in the system. During this transition, which opened space for creativity and opportunity, I worked in the county as a resident in the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Doctor of Education Leadership Program. My task was to demonstrate that the system had the tools and resources it needed to drive a robust improvement and organizational learning strategy that could significantly impact the instructional and professional culture in Prince George’s County. While navigating the political dynamics arising as people entered and left the organization, I worked to implement a two-pronged theory of action to provide the system with a glimpse of what instructional improvement could be in Prince George’s County. After establishing a network of schools that used the Data Wise Improvement Process to drive learning in schools that were once deemed the lowest performing in the county, network leaders leveraged this proof point to highlight the impact that focused data use based on inquiry and collaboration had on the instructional core. As the school year progressed and the highest-ranking leaders in the district fleshed out the organizational structure, they searched for an approach to school improvement that could drive systemic learning: the Priority Schools Network’s use of Data Wise became a significant point of interest for district leadership. A couple key takeaways from this strategic project are informative for all school systems and have special implications for the largest ones. Paring back and equipping schools with a process to arrive at a single, school-wide, high leverage instructional focus, combined with an opportunity to share learning across schools, can rid schools and school leaders of the paralysis that results from the expectation that schools serve multiple uncoordinated aims.