Why Outcomes Are the Wrong Place to Start

A school administrator sits down with her team to look at end of year reading assessment data. Third grade is down three percentage points from last year. The energy in the room shifts. This becomes urgent. A problem to fix.

Within a week, the team has commissioned a reading intervention. New materials are ordered. Teachers are pulled for training. Progress monitoring plans are written. There's momentum. There's action.

And six months later, those numbers still haven't moved.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: improving outcomes is the wrong place to start improvement.

Not because outcomes don't matter. They matter enormously. But they're lagging indicators. They're the result of dozens of decisions made weeks and months before. By the time you see them, you're looking at the past.

When you start with outcomes, you're starting after the thinking has already happened. You're trying to change the end without understanding the beginning.

Outcomes Tell You Something Happened. They Don't Tell You Why.

Think about what an outcome actually is. It's a number. A percentage. A snapshot of where students landed on a particular measure at a particular moment.

What it doesn't tell you is the instructional practice that produced it.

A third grade class with low reading scores might have that outcome because of any number of reasons. Maybe students aren't getting enough time with connected text. Maybe decoding instruction is separated from comprehension. Maybe students are reading words but not understanding meaning. Maybe the pacing is too fast. Maybe assessment doesn't match instruction.

You could look at that outcome and see a problem. But what's the actual problem? That's what you need to understand.

In a collective collaboration system, this distinction becomes critical. If another principal in your district has a similar reading outcome, you need to know whether it's the same problem or a different one. Because if it's the same problem, you solve it together. If it's different problems, the solution from the other school won't transfer.

But you can't figure out if it's the same problem by looking at outcomes. You have to look at practice.

The Shift From Outcomes to Practice

Here's what changes when you flip the starting point.

Instead of asking "Why are outcomes down?" you ask "What practice is producing this outcome?"

This is a different question. It requires you to look at the instructional experience students are actually having. Not the result. The process.

When you look at practice, you see choices. You see what teachers decided to emphasize and what they didn't. You see how time is allocated. You see the sequence of instruction. You see what students encounter daily.

Now you have something to work with. Not a problem to fix, but a design challenge to think about.

For example: if low reading outcomes are connected to decoding instruction that's separate from meaning making, the practice challenge is clear. You need instruction where students decode connected text and immediately work to understand it. That's a design question your team can think about together.

That's also something another school can learn from. When you describe the practice challenge, other principals can ask themselves: "Are we doing the same thing? Do we have the same practice pattern?" And if they do, you learn together about how to shift it.

Why Leaders Default to Outcomes

The reason most improvement efforts start with outcomes is simple: outcomes are concrete. They're measurable. They're visible.

You can point to data and say "This is the problem." Everyone understands immediately. A number down is a problem. A number up is success.

But practice is messier. It's harder to see. It requires time in classrooms. It requires observation. It requires conversation. It's not as efficient as looking at a number.

And when school leaders are drowning in competing demands, efficiency feels urgent.

But there's a cost to that efficiency. You spend time and resources fixing the symptom instead of understanding the cause. You implement interventions that don't actually address the practice that's creating the outcome.

And in a district building a collective collaboration system, you lose the opportunity to create shared understanding about what's actually producing results.

The Design Reframe

Here's the leadership move: instead of seeing outcomes as the starting point, see them as information that points you toward a practice question.

When outcomes go down, your thinking isn't "We need to fix this." It's "What practice might be producing this outcome? What instruction are students actually experiencing?"

Then you get curious. You observe. You talk with teachers about their thinking. You look at student work. You try to understand what's happening in that classroom that's creating that outcome.

And sometimes you'll discover the outcome isn't actually about what you thought. Sometimes low reading outcomes aren't about decoding at all. Sometimes they're about access to time for actual reading. Or comprehension strategy instruction. Or something else entirely.

You can only know if you look at practice first.

And when you understand practice, you can describe it clearly enough that it travels. Other schools recognize themselves in it. Whole systems start thinking about the same practice challenges together.

The Leadership Pause

The next time you see outcome data that concerns you, pause before you jump to an intervention.

Ask yourself: What practice might be producing this outcome? What would I need to see in classrooms to understand this better?

Then go look. Not to evaluate. To understand.

That understanding is where improvement actually begins.

Further Reading:

Fullan, M. (2015). The New Meaning of Educational Change (5th ed.). Teachers College Press. Fullan's seminal work emphasizes that sustainable improvement comes from understanding and changing the conditions that produce outcomes, not from targeting outcomes directly. He argues that focusing on practice and systems change is more effective than data driven accountability focused solely on results.

Hattie, J. A. C. (2012). Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning. Routledge. Hattie's research demonstrates that what matters for student achievement is the instructional practices teachers use and how visible those practices are to students. Outcomes improve when practice changes, not when pressure on outcomes increases.