The data backlash

Data rules in American K-12 education. In the decade since the passage of No Child Left Behind, states have assessed students in grades 3-8, as well as at least once in high school. And the result of this massive testing enterprise has been a colossal accumulation of student achievement data. Working with these raw materials, policy elites have produced a slew of indicators, including report cards on schools and, more recently, “value” added measures of teacher quality.

Parents have begun to question the degree to which test scores are indicative of learning.

Yet while there is an enormous quantity of data, the qualitative picture it presents is quite limited. To their credit, analysts continue to get better at slicing the data; student growth measures, for instance, are innovative instruments that produce a level of comparability across different populations. Still, no amount of creativity can get them around the fact that they are missing most of the pieces in a large and complicated puzzle. Achievement data presents a general picture of students’ basic academic competencies. But it indicates little about a student’s ability to think or write or persuade, to perform experiments or conduct research, to paint, or to play an instrument. And it reveals nothing about a school’s climate, its academic orientation, or its culture.