R&D: Using data wisely at the system level

District-level administrators carefully analyze their own performance data, practicing what they preach to local educators.

A little more than a decade ago, the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Boston Public Schools joined forces to create the Data Wise Improvement Process, a step-by-step approach to analyzing and using data to improve schools. It was intended to help teachers work collaboratively to improve their classroom instruction. Increasingly, though, district-level administrators also have begun to rely on Data Wise, as they’ve learned that this sort of collaborative, data-driven inquiry can help develop a systemwide culture of improvement (Coburn, Touré, & Yamashita, 2009; Park, Daly, & Guerra, 2013).