ABSTRACTTELL ME SUMTHIN GOOD: LEADER NARRATIVES TO UNDERSTAND DATA USE IN BLACK SCHOOL COMMUNITIESByRonetta Paresi WardsSchooling experiences for Black students in the US have been shaped historically by anti-education laws, mandates, and initiatives that sustain unjust systemic practices and policies. These practices and policies often stagnate academic progress and have led to institutional deficits and the normalization of deficit-orientations towards students in predominantly Black schools. Accountability expectations set forth by federal legislation is just one example of how educational policy play a role in sustained deficit orientations toward Black schools through the utility of student performance information. State education agencies use student performance information from annual assessments to grade, categorize, and make decisions around support resources for students. This annual data snapshot also determine funding and shape the allocation of resources for schools despite their need to support students in non-academic ways. Currently, student performance information is constructed in a way that provide a singular view of student performance information based on proficiency leveling and categorical grouping of students. This grouping is centered on students’ lack of skill and in turn automatically posits them in a place of deficit within the data. This view of data also shape the way school leaders draw on, make sense of and interact with data toward decision-making to improve educational outcomes. A new approach is needed to inform leadership decision making and support for alternative perspectives with data use to overcome institutional deficits and ineffective use of data in Black schools. The purpose of this study was to understand the sensemaking of data use through the stories told by school leaders in predominantly Black schools. This study used conceptual frames associated with sensemaking theory (Weick, 1995), school leader sensemaking theory (Gannon-Shilon & Schechter, 2017) and data use theory (Coburn & Turner, 2012) as guardrails to better understand elementary school leaders and their data use practices. Data use in school leadership is significant and can serve as a strategy to improve instructional practice. School leaders who have advanced data literacy skill sets can leverage student performance information (data) in ways that bring about insight (knowledge) to inform their leadership practice. School leaders are responsible for many aspects of the school operation and classroom instruction plays a major role toward improvement efforts. The improvement of instructional practice can lead to better educational outcomes for students in Black school communities. This study sought to capture the stories told by school leaders, specifically leaders in predominantly Black schools. This research study aimed to better understand how leaders accessed, interacted with, acted on and made sense of their data use practices toward the improvement of educational outcomes in their school. The main research question that guided this study was: • How do the stories of elementary school leaders serving in predominantly Black school communities explain how data is used to make decisions toward educational improvement? This study also sought to answer the following sub- questions: • What stories do elementary school leaders tell about how they use data to inform their leadership practice? • What contextual factors influence school leader interactions with data? In the analysis of the data, two different approaches helped to arrive at a broadened view of the data. In the first approach, leader stories were restoried and aligned to themes set forth by Clandinin and Connolly’s (2000) three-dimensional narrative structure; interaction, continuity, and situation to view their experiences along a continuum. In the second approach, an open qualitative analysis was conducted and the leader stories were posited as data for interpretation. The findings brought forth a rich description of the leader's experience from two distinct analytical perspectives. The participant stories situated in the context of Black school communities provided a glimpse into the benefits and challenges leaders faced with data use towards educational improvement. Through these stories their voices are centered to offer insight into how data use practice can either help or hinder their improvement efforts. This knowledge is significant in that it can be transferable to other education spaces to inform policy at large and potentially re-story the public discourse around educational improvement in ethnically diverse school communities.
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