Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 4, No. 4 | The Impact of Data on Education, page 5

Conclusion
The dropout/graduation issue alone provides a good snapshot of current trends in the collection of education data. It illustrates the ability of data to lead to effective change; it illustrates the need for adequate IT systems, trained personnel and visionary leadership to translate data into action; and shows to what extent educators are beginning to adapt to data-driven decision making throughout the country.

The same could be said of formative assessments, teacher quality or the various data collection systems that have been adopted by each of the 50 states. Where there’s little dispute, said Michele Cahill of Carnegie Corporation, is with the ability of education data to inform decisions made at both the administrative level and the classroom level. Collecting and analyzing data has become the new mantra in education circles, she said.

She compared the current interest in data to what corporations have been doing for years. Businesses study their markets, she noted. If they had customers, for example, that bought their products for a while and then stopped, they would want to know why and what they could do to get them back. In the same way, schools need to find out who is learning, who is not, and how to change instructional methods to keep students in school and give them the academic skills they’ll need in college and the workplace.

In the New York City dropout study, school leaders found that there were students who entered high school far behind academically, showed up for a while, failed and then stopped going to school. There were also those who entered with good skills and did quite well academically, but they had no attachment to school and they also dropped out. “We had to segment the problem,” Cahill said, “and we couldn’t do that without different kinds of data.” With that data, school administrators were then able to address the needs of the dropout population.

Tucker put it this way: “It’s not just the school district having the data. It’s actually having the capacity, the time and the resources to use the data effectively.”

The purpose of looking at data, Cahill said, is to ensure practices are put in place to achieve a specific goal, whether it’s dropout prevention or something else. “If you’re improving practices toward the goal of doing better on a test,” she said, “that may or may not be an improvement in achievement. It depends on the quality of the test.”

It depends on whether it’s a formative assessment, if it’s an end-of-the-year statewide assessment, if it’s the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the SAT, the ACT, or any number of other tests.

“If we think writing is really critical,” she said, “and everyone should be able to write this kind of piece—certain kinds of nonfiction, for example—by fourth grade, sixth grade and eighth grade, and all of the tests throughout are multiple choice, then you don’t have any data that’s helping you understand how your kids write. You’ve got to square these things.”

In other words, what matters is how learning and progress in school is assessed. It matters just as much as having the right hardware and software, properly trained personnel and strong leadership. The nuances of what’s being measured, how it’s being measured and how those measurements are being used make a tremendous difference, and it’s paramount, Cahill said, that everyone understands what they are. It’s key to ensuring that data is used to hold
everyone accountable and to improve the status quo.

Lucy Hood is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance journalist. She has written about education for the past 11 years, winning state, national and international awards for her enterprise reporting. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, she also worked as a correspondent in Mexico and Central America.