What Do Educators Do With Data?

Tomorrow, we’ll release the new Education Sector report, Putting Data into Practice: Lessons from New York City. While much of the policy talk focuses on the use of evaluative data — accountability policies, value-added scores to evaluate teacher or school performance, district-wide proficiency rates, etc. — this report instead focuses on educators’ use of data for instructional purposes.

Earlier this year, in our Five Principles for Smarter Data Systems series of guest posts, Laurence Holt was spot on when he called for a clear theory of action for data systems and the use of data. We need to get serious about drawing the through line for how all that data actually impacts teaching and learning. Here’s a quick preview from tomorrow’s report:

…technology holds little value unless it is flexible, relevant, and provides the fine-grained information that teachers really need….building a data system is only the first step—what educators do with the data is the critical second. Building the conditions and demand for data-based analysis is often more difficult than collecting the data itself.

While you’re waiting for tomorrow’s report release, here’s a quick link to dozens of our data-related posts from the past few years.