The school data problem: what we have vs. what we need

By Valerie Strauss. It’s the backbone of the modern school reform: data. And a lot of it, it turns out, isn’t any good. Here’s a post about  the problem of the data we have vs. the data we need, by Jack Schneider, an assistant professor of education at the College of the Holy Cross, who confronted the issue recently when he helped the Boston Globe create a rating tool for schools in Massachusetts. Schneider is the author of   “Excellence For All: How a New Breed of Reformers Is Transforming America’s Public Schools” and the upcoming ”From the Ivory Tower to the Schoolhouse: How Scholarship Becomes Common Knowledge in Education.”  He tweets @Edu_Historian. Read more...