Data warehousing, data-driven decision making, or business intelligence - whatever its name, it's the latest thing for managing school systems, according to a short article in this Sunday's Education Life supplement to The New York Times. Mimicking businesses, accountability-minded administrators are gathering up the reams of data they collect each year and storing them on centralized computer systems so they can be linked and analyzed for patterns. Such data include test scores, grades, attendance records, and information about teacher certification, student demographics, immigration patterns, medical problems, disciplinary actions, and student transfers, among other things. Once analyzed, administrators hope the data can be used to improve teaching, raise test scores, and deter dropouts (and to justify new programs to the state legislature). Concerns have been raised that such data may be used to take punitive measures against teachers whose students are performing poorly, the author notes, but school systems say that this is not their intent. See "Business Intelligence: Insights from the Data Pile," by Leslie Berger, The New York Times, January 13, 2002.
