Data Was Supposed to Fix the U.S. Education System. Here’s Why It Hasn’t.


Simon Rodberg at Harvard Business School: “For too long, the American education system failed too many kids, including far too many poor kids and kids of color, without enough public notice or accountability. To combat this, leaders of all political persuasions championed the use of testing to measure progress and drive better results. Measurement has become so common that in school districts from coast to coast you can now find calendars marked “Data Days,” when teachers are expected to spend time not on teaching, but on analyzing data like end-of-year and mid-year exams, interim assessments, science and social studies and teacher-created and computer-adaptive tests, surveys, attendance and behavior notes. It’s been this way for more than 30 years, and it’s time to try a different approach.

The big numbers are necessary, but the more they proliferate, the less value they add. Data-based answers lead to further data-based questions, testing, and analysis; and the psychology of leaders and policymakers means that the hunt for data gets in the way of actual learning. The drive for data responded to a real problem in education, but bad thinking about testing and data use has made the data cure worse than the disease….

The leadership decision at stake is how much data to collect. I’ve heard variations on “In God we trust; all others bring data” at any number of conferences and beginning-of-school-year speeches. But the mantra “we believe in data” is actually only shorthand for “we believe our actions should be informed by the best available data.” In education, that mostly means testing. In other fields, the kind of process is different, but the issue is the same. The key question is not, “will the data be useful?” (of course it can be) or, “will the data be interesting?” (Yes, again.) The proper question for leaders to ask is: will the data help us make better-enough decisions to be worth the cost of getting and using it? So far, the answer is “no.”

Nationwide data suggests that the growth of data-driven schooling hasn’t worked even by its own lights. Harvard professor Daniel Koretz says “The best estimate is that test-based accountability may have produced modest gains in elementary-school mathematics but no appreciable gains in either reading or high-school mathematics — even though reading and mathematics have been its primary focus.”

We wanted data to help us get past the problem of too many students learning too little, but it turns out that data is an insufficient, even misleading answer. It’s possible that all we’ve learned from our hyper-focus on data is that better instruction won’t come from more detailed information, but from changing what people do. That’s what data-driven reform is meant for, of course: convincing teachers of the need to change and focusing where they need to change….(More)”.