Education data needs to be used carefully

Alan Borsuk:

From Washington to the classroom, everybody in education is more and more into data. Just look at the new report cards for every public school put out several weeks ago by the state Department of Public Instruction.

Data can drive quality, many policy-makers say, and there are schools that are justified in proclaiming how they have improved by being data driven.

Schools and districts are increasingly being judged by data.

There's a lot of good in this. Not paying close attention to how students are doing - including test scores and similar data - is the road to mediocrity or worse.

But it also makes me nervous, especially when I hear things such as calls for "performance pay" or firing bad teachers based on student test scores and rates of improvement, despite the lack of evidence that such efforts can be reliable and useful, especially on a large scale.

In other words, if data is taking over how we judge schools and everyone who works in them, that will be good only if we use data well.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at November 18, 2012 2:37 AM
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