- Home
- Topics
- Improving performance
- Implementing the Recovery Act
- Transforming the workforce
- Collaborating across boundaries
- Contracting & acquisition
- Fostering transparency & democracy
- Managing finances & budgets
- Improving healthcare
- Conserving energy & the environment
- Using technology
- Strengthening cybersecurity
- New to government?
- Magazine
- Radio hour
- Reports
- Blogs
- About us
Data, Data Everywhere: But Are There Brains to Think?
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010 - 3:57
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.”
182 recommendations
Even when the teachers have objective or subjective data it often doesn't get relayed to parents. Teachers, administrators, and schools for some reason like to keep negative data from parents. For instance, teachers in the school my child attends have a monthly meeting to discuss at risk children. I was told last week my child has been discussed in those meetings for at least the last 2 years (the teacher didn't go back further in the records). Yet last week was the first we had heard about such meetings. And how did it come out? I flat out told the teacher my child was tracking for remedial level classes in college, and that no one at the school seemed overly concerned. My statement obviously was not based on data the school provided, because they have no such metrics. Parents have access to the Illinois Report Card for the school, the students quarterly report card, students grades, and that's about it. I have to ask for scores on tests which qualify my child for "reading club". I have to ask which test and version was given, how many questions were asked, etc. I have to ask what % a "4" is on a report card, what % a "3" is, a "2". You know what they say? "It doesn't equate to a %". "We don't provide that information." Excuse me? They are a public school. That should be public information. I guess I could FOIA it. They obviously have some % or rubric or something, I mean the grade doesn't fall out of the sky, it's calculated somehow. This is all in upper middle class suburbia. Supposedly good schools, supposedly one of the better districts in the state. Well back to my story. The reading club teacher says the child should be out of reading club soon and she'll be back on track. Now think about that statement. If she barely no longer qualifies for reading club in 5th grade, how on track do you think she is for no remedial level classes in college? The reading club teacher is thinking rather narrowly in terms of qualify for reading club or don't qualify, not so much in terms of preparing this child for middle school, high school, and college. I wouldn't say the reading club teacher is heartless, just rather narrow minded, and it's just the culture of the school and district and even state. Anyways the classroom teacher did state my child is behind, and may stay behind, through high school. When do I find this out. In 5th grade only after challenging them. Well this week was veto session in the Illinois Legislature. Looking at the union website, what do they trump. The passage of an improved school report card? No message of that in the union president's video to its members. Only message the pension reform bill had been defeated. So all you number crunchers and analysts I appreciate your efforts and hopefully we'll see some results sooner rather than later. We sorely need more visibility in what is happening in these schools.