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Data, Data Everywhere: But Are There Brains to Think?
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010 - 4:57
Tuesday, June 15, 2010 - 14:50
The Recovery Act is creating new and better data systems. Now we need new and better skills to use them.
To increase quality and decrease costs, people need good, timely information about what works and what doesn’t. With that notion in mind, the Recovery Act has stressed the importance of building up and improving the nation’s data systems. In fact, in health care, education and justice, the vision of interconnected systems that help to share and analyze data is part of the fabric of reform plans.
But building up the systems is the beginning. Without hiring and training people to analyze the data, it’s like expecting to win the Indianapolis 500 by building a race car, but never hiring a driver. Our prediction: As the years pass, there could well be a real shortage of analytic capacity to make these Recovery-Act-systems really pay off.
In several recent public health conferences, for example, we’ve heard that both training and skilled data analysts are in short supply. “We don’t know what an infomatics person looks like,” said one attendee at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials public workforce summit in Atlanta in May. Another remarked that the health information technology area was very muddy in terms of what people would be doing or what training they might need. An official involved with Massachusetts health reform noted that one of the major challenges was hiring people with the analytic skills to make use of the data that was to transform health delivery.
This is a familiar theme to us. In ten years of working on the Pew Center on the States’ Government Performance Project, we repeatedly heard leaders and managers complain that new technology was under-utilized because of skill and training deficits. Similarly, past studies by the Government Accountability Office have chronicled continuing improvements in data, but depressingly little change – and sometimes backward movement – in how managers actually use the information they have.
Some states are trying to do the right thing. Yesterday, we noted that Minnesota was devoting a portion of its stimulus dollars to softer skill building training for teachers. “Historically, education hasn’t been an information-based sector,” says Paige Kowalski, senior associate for the Data Quality Campaign. “There’s been a lot of data out there, but it hasn’t been presented to folks in actionable, user-friendly ways.”
Kowalski believes that in education, it’s not so much a shortage of professional data analysts, but that just about everybody involved in education needs to learn how to be a data analyst, so that teachers, parents, principals and policy makers know what kinds of questions the data can answer. “That’s a skill that a lot of states are sorely missing in house,” Kowalski says.
The Data Quality Campaign, a national collaborative effort to improve education data quality, has been engaged in conversations with teacher preparation programs, talking about building up basic analytic skills and critical thinking skills to get more teachers to understand the kinds of direction that the data can provide. If you can track similar patterns among students who drop out, for example, you can develop an early warning system that will flag students who are in danger of following that path.
Among the pioneering states is Oregon, which is training teachers and principals on data use and has a comprehensive website that’s been a good model. Georgia and several others are also moving toward the idea of developing data coaches, who are trained in how to look at data in a strategic way so they can go into the schools and train others.
But in general, there are many miles to go, even in states that recognize the needs.
“On a scale of 1 to 10, we’re at a 1,” says Kowalski. “States haven't done what they need to do to implement policies and practices to ensure that educators have the skills to use the data.”