Thursday, December 6, 2012

Professional Slap in the Face

As a data leader is it my job to pull down data from a number of sources, break that data into meaningful chunks and distribute said information to various groups and individuals throughout our building. At our last building in-service, my boss asked me for some assessment and discipline data for our school to be presented to the staff. At the end of our session a staff member came up to me very upset that I had presented "skewed data" because I had shown the number of discipline referrals by ethnicity but did not include the number of "repeat offenders." I discussed this with him and agreed that it would be interesting to look at that data and that I intended to do so and share it with the staff the next time I was given time to do so. After our discussion I shared the information with my boss and then went to investigate on my own. Come to find out, the data weren't skewed at all - the percentages were almost equal. About 1/2 of our discipline referrals are represented by one ethnic group and about half of the students with multiple offences come from that same ethnic group. In fact when I made pie charts I could almost literally lay one on top of the other and have the exact same portions. 

A couple of weeks after the session, my boss asked me to post the data slides I had ALREADY PRESENTED on my "Data Bulletin Board" in the staff lounge for the staff to review, which I did. This morning I noticed that someone had defaced my display. In ink, someone had written "This is skewed data. It misrepresents our student population" and so on... I was completely taken aback that another "professional" in my building would do something like that. Since I remembered the conversation after I had originally presented the information, I assumed that it was the same person that had defaced my work. So, being the outspoken person that I am, I walked right up to him and asked him if he had done it. At first he tried to say he hadn't, then he tried to say that he didn't know that it was mine and finally argued that he was justified in defacing my work because he felt it was skewed data. Throughout the conversation I told him: "Yes, a number of those slide could be misleading - we're on the same page with that" and "If you'll remember, I agreed with you at the time of our conversation but that's not the point. The point is you could tell that an adult in the building had put in work and posted it and you defaced it anyway. I would NEVER walk into your classroom and deface anything you had posted." He tried to justify his actions several times as he felt the data were skewed while I continued to state that I agreed with his point on the data but that I found it professionally insulting that he decided to deface my WORK. He finally said we'd have to "agree to disagree." 

I'm not crazy am I? This is clearly a display of unprofessional behavior, right??

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