According to this Education Resource Strategies report, State Education Agencies (SEAs) possess “a gold mine of untapped material”—vast amounts of school and district data collected annually. This information is currently used for accountability purposes or to inform research and policy, but the report calls for what may be an even more important data deployment to inform local decisions that could potentially help schools make the most of limited resources. For example, Maryville Middle School in Tennessee used value-added performance data on teacher effectiveness to match educator strengths with student needs. The result? Maryville has repeatedly outperformed all other schools in the state on student growth measures
A good example, yet it’s also a fact that raw data alone are not too useful. Helpfully, the report offers several ways in which SEAs can make this information more actionable for local education agencies. They can, for example, create their own analyses providing feedback on allocations of people, time, and money. Such analyses should examine the connection between resources and student achievement so schools and districts can deploy the most effective or relevant resources to the students who need them most.
Besides such sensible (if obvious) recommendations, this report serves to highlight what well-designed data systems can do. If we want to make the most of the resources within our current K–12 systems, data may be the most powerful tool we have.
SOURCE: Stephen Frank and Joseph Trawick-Smith, “Spinning Straw into Gold: How state education agencies can transform their data to improve critical school resource decisions,” Education Resource Strategies (December 2014).
