5 in 5: Chris Woolard, Ohio Department of Education’s Senior Executive Director for the Center for Performance and Impact

Results for America Fellowship Alumni give five answers in five minutes. This month, we caught up with Chris Woolard, Senior Executive Director for the Center for Performance and Impact for the Ohio Department of Education.

1. Summarize what you do and how you do it.
   Our team, the Center for Performance and Impact, develops and implements assessment and accountability systems and research and evaluation frameworks to use data for continuous improvement. Our mission has very much evolved in the past few years as we focus on how we can use these systems to support continuous improvement.
2. Share something exciting that you’re working on.
   Ohio has been working with our regional partners across the state to build up a network focused on supporting school districts in their use of data. The Regional Data Leads have a wide variety of experiences working directly with our districts and we are partnering with them to design and prioritize professional learning and resources. Our recent State Longitudinal Data System grant is directly supporting the work. Ideally, we can move the field’s perceptions of data away from “compliance” and toward something much more productive.
3. Tell us one thing you learned from someone else during your RFA Fellowship.
   It is hard to narrow it down to just one thing. RFA’s State Education Fellowship gave me a chance to work with so many smart people that are running into similar challenges. One of the most powerful convenings was when the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education team hosted us for a day in their offices to interact directly with agency staff charged with carrying out work similar to ours. They are a leader among states in using data and research.
4. If you could wave a magic wand and have any data or evidence, what would it be?
   I struggled to come up with a creative answer to this question and then realized that the question itself was the issue. There is no magic wand for this. It is about systemic hard work to build structures and change culture. (That being said, I would be really interested in how we can get at a more robust set of indicators of school quality.)
5. What’s the [pick-your-adjective] job you’ve ever had?
   I have worked at the Ohio Department of Education for a long time, so there are probably lots of adjectives I could use! As an undergraduate, I studied to be a social studies teacher — and that morphed into a focus on public policy in graduate school. I don’t know that this job is what I had planned on, but I found a career that is at the nexus of things that I care about. I am fundamentally committed to the nature of what this group is trying to do (improve education for all kids!).

Extra Question: How is the Ohio Department of Education adapting its work in response to COVID-19 and urgent calls for racial equity?
It has been rather amazing how the Ohio Department of Education has changed in the past year. Bureaucracies are notoriously slow to change, but last March (like everyone else), we turned on a dime. Not only in how we conducted our work, but in the supports we put in place. For example, we are using our federal CARES dollars to support connectivity and learning through our RemotEDx initiative. Additionally, our assessment team built resources to help schools collect data to gauge where students are. This is work that will be integrated in the supports provided by our Regional Data Leads. Our agency leadership continues to focus on equity — which is one of the three core principles of Ohio’s Strategic Plan for Education.

Chris Woolard participated in Results for America’s State Education Fellowship.