The Power of Education Data: Transforming Learning and Improving Outcomes

In today's educational landscape, data has emerged as a powerful tool for driving informed decision-making and fostering continuous improvement. Education data encompasses quantitative and qualitative information gathered from various stakeholders, including teachers, students, parents, and administrators. This data, when analyzed and interpreted effectively, can provide valuable insights into student learning, teaching practices, and the overall health of the education system.

Understanding Education Data

Education data can be broadly categorized into two types:

Quantitative Data: This type of data is numerical and can be measured and analyzed statistically. Examples include student test scores, attendance rates, and graduation rates.
Qualitative Data: This type of data is descriptive and provides insights into experiences, perspectives, and attitudes. Qualitative data can be collected through interviews, observations, and open-ended survey questions. This data is information that is not represented by numbers, but tends to be more descriptive. Qualitative data can come from interviews, written responses, observations, etc. This data is information that has a numerical value.

The Role of Data in School Accountability Systems

Today’s school accountability systems are the primary tool education leaders use to understand the health of the education system and how well it provides all children an opportunity to learn the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in the 21st century. They accomplish this by measuring and transparently reporting students’ yearly outcomes in academics and other areas. When schools do not meet benchmarks, states require that they take action to improve. However, this system of accountability fails to include meaningful metrics that take into account the context in which students learn, their communities, and the resources made available to them. Most existing school accountability systems do not give leaders-especially those at the local level-a recipe to follow that leads to better outcomes for students. And yet, local school communities, parents, and caregivers are hungry for this information. They want data that can guide their daily actions to support student learning, both in the classroom and beyond school walls.

How Stakeholders Use Education Data

Each group of stakeholders has its own set of informational needs and ways it uses data to support students. Caregivers, educators, and school leaders are hungry for timely information closely tied to student learning to inform their decision-making and improve the quality of education children receive.

1. Empowering Students and Families

Individuals, from schoolchildren to adult learners, and those closest to them use data on their own progress as well as external measures of success, such as grade-level learning standards. They also need information on the systems they are navigating, such as how well local schools are meeting students’ needs or which postsecondary opportunities are available to them. With this information, individuals and families are empowered to make informed decisions and pursue the best pathways for their needs, priorities, and goals.

Informed Decision-Making: When families are engaged in their child’s learning and have access to actionable, meaningful data, they can support learning at home and make the best educational decisions for their children. Caregiver involvement in education is vital.
School Choice: Forty-seven states and the District of Columbia offer some form of open enrollment or allow students to attend the school of their choice. Performance data gathered and used in state accountability systems, collected through end-of-year tests, measure student achievement on grade-level standards or learning expectations by the end of the year. Caregivers and school staff receive reports on whether students and the school met these grade-level learning standards.
Curriculum insights: Adults caring for school-aged children know the kind of education they want kids to experience, and they want to know that schools are providing it. I am really going to look at the curriculum with, like, Google eyes. I want to break down what resources do they have? Are they going to have a science lab? Are they going to learn languages? I want [my daughter] to be supported socially. I want her to be supported academically. I want her to be supported emotionally. What community-based organizations have already been contracted to provide these services for our children? Caregivers also want to see school data on report cards broken down by student demographic groups, laid out visually, and explained in plain language.

2. Guiding Educators and School Leaders

The other people that make up these support systems-teachers, school leaders, counselors, community partners, and more-need data to help individuals along their paths to success:

Improving Instruction: Teachers can use data on student learning to evaluate and adapt their own instruction. School and district leaders can use this information to inform professional development and programming decisions. College administrators can use data to better understand their students’ career aspirations and ensure that their postsecondary opportunities prepare them for the future.
Curriculum Adjustment: When educators, school, and district leaders are provided with more timely and useful information, they can improve the quality of teaching and learning happening in the classroom. For example, when teachers identify gaps in student learning, they can adjust the curriculum to meet students’ needs. This approach can be used schoolwide to modify the current curriculum or select a new one. Adjusting curricula is one example where increased access to timely and useful information can help educators and school leaders improve their students’ quality of education. A scenario could involve a significant portion of students entering fifth grade unable to multiply two-digit numbers proficiently, year after year.
Understanding Student Readiness: District and school staff want to better understand what student readiness looks like and how to measure student readiness in real time, both academically and nonacademically. District and school staff understand the importance of nonacademic information about their students. But there are things like student wellness and time management and teamwork and grit and emotional intelligence and citizenship and analytical thinking and aesthetic awareness. Data like those outlined above are closely tied to student learning. This information helps teachers and school leaders make timely decisions to improve all students’ educational experiences. Other sought-after information includes classroom best practices, how well schools support teachers’ professional growth, community engagement, students’ ability to persevere, and students’ ability to ask for help.
School Improvement Plans: School leaders found state performance data useful to inform school boards, compare school performance, and identify trends over time. However, they and many other participants did not see much use for the data when it came to guiding their daily actions to support student learning. Without being able to see the answers that my students give, I can’t really identify how they’re coming up with the marks or the evaluations.

3. Informing Policymakers and Researchers

Ensuring all of these people can access data and communicate with each other ensures that every individual has their needs met and is set up for success. At the same time, policymakers, researchers, and education and workforce leaders depend on aggregate data to see the “big picture” of how schools and institutions are effectively meeting individuals’ needs. With access to data, they can identify best practices and promote policies and programs that are shown to improve outcomes for individuals. Leaders need data to see where gaps between student groups persist and allocate resources where they are most needed. In these ways, state leaders can leverage data to create more effective and equitable education and workforce systems. Leaders at all levels have a responsibility to ensure that everyone can access data that answers their questions. They must break down information silos at the state and local levels by connecting data from P-20W (early childhood, K-12, postsecondary, and workforce) in their data systems and provide tools and resources to help people effectively use data in decisionmaking. Robust privacy policies are essential to protect individuals’ data and maintain public trust in data use.

Assessing System Health: The data provided from state accountability systems are the primary tools policymakers use to determine the education system’s health and measure educational equity. However, state accountability systems do not provide all the necessary information that caregivers, educators, and other school stakeholders need to guide their daily actions to support student learning.
Guiding Policies and Investments: The data that states report are necessary and useful for policymakers to target supports and additional investments to schools that need them.

Building a Culture of Data Use

At both the K-12 and postsecondary levels, leaders' capacity to use data for the intended purposes may vary depending on the presence of a culture of data use. A culture of data use results when an education organization commits to using data for continuous improvement at the school and classroom levels and embodies that commitment by emphasizing collaboration and empowering teachers and school leaders to make decisions for which they will be held accountable. To promote a culture of data use, leaders must set expectations with school/university staff and personnel to encourage data use in multiple areas of the school system. Developing a clear communication plan may help collaborations and partnerships. Ensuring that the data collected can be accessed easily and analyzed efficiently is also helpful. Finally, the data that are collected should clearly align with systems-wide goals. Stakeholders across the Appalachia region have reported that they suffer from DRIP syndrome: they are Data Rich and Information Poor, and they are motivated to change that reality. The Regional Educational Laboratory Appalachia (REL AP) Cross-State Partnership on Using Data and Evidence to Facilitate Action is working with education leaders in Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia to address DRIP syndrome by identifying opportunities to strengthen capacity among local data users to access, understand, and use state data to draw insights and facilitate action. To begin this work partnership members asked, "What skills, structures, and supports do district and state leaders need to create a culture of data-driven decision making?" To answer this question, REL AP staff first scanned existing literature and resources to: Understand what data leaders use and how they use them. Compile tools and guides to support use of data. In this blog post we share what we learned from the literature scan, first describing the types of data commonly used at the K-12 and postsecondary levels and how education leaders have used these data and then providing resources for overcoming DRIP Syndrome in the education system. Education leaders in Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia will build on these lessons as they work with REL AP to conduct research around data use in their states.

Key Elements for Sustained Improvement

To create the conditions for sustained improvement, we need to have a clear picture of the current reality in our schools. To see the big picture, it’s important to focus on four guiding elements that define how the work we do in schools should look: practices, protocols, processes, and systems.

Your assessments should match the rigor and content aligned to your standards.
The system should inform core instruction as well as intervention needs in your school. See “How to build a balanced assessment system” for insight on pulling together a system that uses formative, interim, and summative assessment effectively.
Creating a simple matrix listing each assessment you use, its purpose, and how often and why you use it can be very revealing. When you gather and organize this data, you’ll be gaining the impartial viewpoint you need to actively take charge of your programs.
This plan should serve as a practical guide to support your programmatic decisions. When creating it, begin by taking your goals into account. Starting with the end goal in mind-what you ultimately want to accomplish-will help you align your practices, protocols, and programs into a sustainable assessment system within your building. In your plan, include a schedule that takes into account when the assessment data rendered is most useful to inform instruction, and make sure the data is available with minimal delay. Consider any additional professional learning, program resources, or family outreach you may need to have in place before, during, or after particular assessment cycles.
As part of your ongoing improvement, it is critical that you not only create the space for collaboration to review and make intentional shifts in your ongoing improvement plans but also to establish clear next steps.
Though this seems like a simple step to follow, I believe it to be one of the more challenging ones. It requires that we hold this collaborative time as sacred. This means all members of the team are present-physically, mentally, and emotionally-as this work drives the rest of our work. Approaching data-driven decisions with more focus and purpose may feel daunting at first, but it will lead to better decision-making in the long run.

The Importance of Community Input

Too often, policies are made without the input of the individuals they directly affect. Policies need community input because community members are most likely to know how they will unfold in practice. For example, students must know how to read and calculate math, measured by state summative exams. This is not to say that state-level accountability systems do not play an important role in K-12 education. They are a vital tool to gauge the health of schools and determine whether they are providing all students with the opportunity to learn and preparing them for college, career, and civic life. However, school systems also need to collect and distribute data that are useful to the purpose of daily teaching and learning guided by families, educators, and school leaders.

Tools and Resources for Data-Driven Decision Making

The U.S. Department of Education and Regional Educational Laboratories (RELs) offer a variety of resources to support data use in education. These resources include frameworks for building a culture of data use, examples of ways state and district leaders have implemented data-driven decisionmaking strategies and disseminated information, and protocols to support district leaders in planning and implementing their own strategies.

REL Resources: The Toolkit for a workshop on building a culture of data use helps school and district teams apply research to practice as they establish and support a culture of data use in their educational setting. The field-tested workshop toolkit guides teams through a set of structured activities to develop an understanding of data-use research in schools and to analyze examples from practice. Research Review: Data-driven decision making in education agencies helps decisionmakers plan to use data to meet the needs of classroom teachers, school administrators, district-level leaders, and state education agency officials. This two-page infographic emphasizes the importance of using data that are relevant to decisionmakers and diagnostic for the issue at hand. What four states are doing to support local data-driven decisionmaking: policies, practices, and programs documents how four state education agencies are supporting local data-driven decisionmaking through their policies, practices, and programs for creating data systems, improving data access and use, and building district and school capacity to use data. In addition to state policies, the study also identified five state programs supporting district and school data use. How are teacher evaluation data used in five Arizona districts describes how educators in five Arizona school districts used results from new multiple-measure teacher evaluations in 2014/15, with each district administering its own local evaluation system developed to align with overarching state evaluation regulations passed in 2011. The findings of this REL West study suggest benefits from organizational structures that support the review of data during the school year, such as standards-based observation frameworks, benchmark assessments, professional learning communities, and instructional coaching and feedback. A district's use of data and research to inform policy formation and implementation analyzes the Syracuse (New York) City School District's development and implementation of a new discipline policy, the Syracuse Code of Conduct, Character and Support. The descriptive study suggests components of a coherent strategy for using data and research to inform policy and practice that other districts might consider. The Guide to using the Teacher Data Use Survey provides step-by-step instructions to help district and school planners conduct the Teacher Data Use Survey to query teachers, administrators, and instructional support staff about how teachers use data to support instruction, their attitudes toward data, and the supports that help teachers use data. This survey provides school or district leaders evidence on which to base decisions such as how to appropriate resources to support teacher data use and develop district policy around data use. The materials from the REL AP cross-state partnership's June 2018 workshop Using Data and Evidence to Facilitate Action: Developing a Research and TCTS Agenda include more information on the cross-state partnership and the research questions we are addressing related to using education data for strategic planning and continuous improvement. The research agenda describes connections between the partnership's logic model, research questions, and research and coaching activities. More information from the literature scan described in this blog post, with additional citations related to these topics is available in the presentation and handouts.
What Works Clearinghouse Resources: The Using student achievement data to support instructional decision making practice guide offers specific and coherent evidence-based recommendations for educators and education administrators to create the organizational conditions necessary to make decisions using student achievement data in classrooms, schools, and districts.

Data-Driven Solutions for K-12 Schools

In the digital age, data has become the backbone of decision-making and progress across various sectors, and education is no exception. As part of the edtech industry, the team at FACTS is constantly looking at how data can shape education and, most importantly, how we can use it to help schools and students.

Personalized Learning: One of the most significant benefits of investing in data-driven solutions is the ability to tailor education to individual students. Every child is unique, and the right data can help to reveal their different strengths, weaknesses, and learning styles.
Effective Assessment and Feedback: Effective assessment and feedback are essential for student development. Strong data leads to detailed assessment tools, many of which may be built directly into your tech solutions. FACTS helps you understand student performance in real time, so you can provide the most valuable assessments and feedback possible.
Teacher Development: While data is important to evaluating student performance, it can also be used for evaluating teachers’ strengths and weaknesses. Data on teacher performance can help identify areas for professional development that would most benefit them.
Resource Allocation: Schools often have limited resources, including budgets, time, and manpower. Data-driven software, such as FACTS’ suite of solutions, helps schools optimize the allocation of these resources. By analyzing data on student performance and the effectiveness of various programs, schools can determine which areas require more attention and resources. For example, FACTS Data Insights can help you better allocate school resources by aggregating your data from FACTS Student Information System, Payment Plans, Financial Aid Management, and Application & Enrollment.
Early Intervention: Early intervention is crucial in addressing academic and behavioral issues in students. With the help of data, schools can identify students who are struggling in various subjects or exhibiting behavioral concerns.
Parental Involvement: Data-driven tools can be the key to increasing parental understanding and involvement in a child’s education. Invest in a solution that offers parents real-time information about their child’s performance, attendance, and behavior.
Accountability and Transparency: In today’s educational landscape, accountability and transparency are paramount. Schools are accountable to students, parents, and communities for their performance. Data-driven solutions allow for the collection and presentation of data on student achievement, graduation rates, attendance, and more.
Long-Term Planning: Effective long-term planning is essential for the success of K-12 schools. Data helps schools forecast future enrollment, plan for the allocation of resources, and identify trends and challenges. Investing in data-driven solutions is no longer a luxury for K-12 schools. In today’s rapidly evolving educational landscape, it’s a necessity. Schools that embrace data-driven decision-making are better equipped to tackle the challenges of the future and provide exceptional educational experiences to their students.

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