Achieving With Data

Achieving With Data How high-performing school systems use data to improve instruction for elementary students.  Using data to improve decision making is a promising systemic reform strategy. However, there is a dearth of rigorous research conducted thus far on this practice. Recently, NewSchools Venture Fund in San Francisco set an agenda to help fill this research gap. As part of a study of data-driven decision making, we were fortunate to visit schools and districts where practices, such as the one depicted in the above quote, are indeed becoming commonplace. In this report, we capture the work of four school systems that were identified as leaders in data-driven decision making.

Our study included two mid-size urban school districts and two nonprofit charter management organizations (CMOs). All of these school systems have records of improving student achievement over time. As we show in our case studies of these performance-driven school systems, the gathering and examining of data is merely a starting point to developing a culture and system of continuous improvement that places student learning at the heart of its efforts. Our study reveals that there is not one way to be a performance-driven system. All of these schools and school systems approached data-driven decision making differently — and all achieved successes in the process. At the same time, the school systems we studied had many features in common that seem to support the effective use of data. In this report, we highlight the choices and tradeoffs made by these schools and school systems, so that educators, policymakers, researchers, grantmakers and others can learn from their experiences.