Executives

John Hollingsworth

John Hollingsworth is the President and co-founder of DataWORKS Educational Research. His company was founded to use real data to improve student achievement. DataWORKS started out providing analysis and disaggregations of STAR test results for over 600 schools per year.

Mr. Hollingsworth realized that analyzing student test scores did not always lead to improved student achievement. He began to ask himself, do you raise test scores by testing students or by teaching them? He then shifted DataWORKS into a relentless focus on improving how students are taught.

Mr. Hollingsworth was instrumental in developing Curriculum Calibration, the process of collecting and analyzing student work for alignment to state standards. DataWORKS has collected and analyzed over 2 million assignments from 48,000 classrooms revealing that many students, especially low income students, are being taught two to four grades below grade level preventing them from doing well on grade-level state tests. Curriculum Calibration has been completed at hundreds of schools in California, in Washington DC, and over 800 schools in South Carolina. Building on the vast experience in analyzing student work, Mr. Hollingsworth facilitated DataWORKS' development of methods to analyze and enhance classroom instruction. So far, DataWORKS observers have sat in more than 25,000 classrooms observing and tallying teaching practices.
Applying this unmatched classroom research and seeing first hand what works and what doesn't, Mr. Hollingsworth then facilitated the creation of staff development specifically designed to provide teachers with the essential classroom instructional skills that help their students learn more and learn faster. Popular trainings requested by schools include:

• Explicit Direct Instruction To Successfully Teach Grade Level Work Every Day
• Implementing English Learner Strategies (SDAIE) To Accelerate EL Students
• Instruction Leadership That Enhances Student Learning

Mr. Hollingsworth has published numerous articles in educational magazines and co-authored Multiple Measures: Accurate Ways to Assess Student Achievement published by Corwin Press in 2000.
He has trained thousands of teachers and administrators in many states including California, South Carolina, Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Missouri, Texas, and Maryland. He has presented at numerous local, state, and national conferences including Association of California School Administrators, National Association of Secondary Principals, National Association of Elementary Principals, South Carolina Curriculum Conference, and Texas Private and Charter Schools Conference.