Before the federal No Child Left Behind Act, the country’s view of school data was blurry, if available at all. Twenty years later, the picture is much clearer, and both supporters and critics of the law credit NCLB for making that happen.
That’s a key finding from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s new research examining the impact of data-driven accountability in education policy over the last 20 years. It includes both a quantitative research review authored by Dan Goldhaber and Michael DeArmond of CALDER, at the American Institutes for Research, and a qualitative analysis authored by Chris Stewart and the team at brightbeam.
The report asks: what can we learn from the last two decades of education policy, and what do we still not know? Here’s what the researchers found:
- Disaggregated data shifted the focus from the average kid to every kid—including Black, Hispanic, low-income students, English learners, and students with special needs. No longer were school districts able to hide the performance of some students behind an average.
- Student achievement increased due to NCLB-era assessment and accountability policies, especially in math and especially for Black, Hispanic, and low-income students, whom the system had not been serving well.
- There is now access to far more reliable, comparable education data than there would be available otherwise, although there has not been sufficient time devoted to its analysis.
- Reforms in teacher evaluation and school turnaround initiatives did not consistently improve student outcomes at scale. In part, this was due to the widely varying quality of how such reforms were implemented.
At the same time, existing research doesn’t answer other key questions:
- Did schools serving historically-underserved students get more money to improve than they otherwise would have?
- What did schools do with any improvement funds they did receive?
- How many schools identified as low-performing became successful?
- Have states seen improvement in measures other than academic achievement, such as improvements in school climate or reductions in chronic absenteeism?
Watch the conversation among the researchers and folks on the ground here:
Future of Data in K-12 Education: Report Release Webinar
Read the full report here. To learn more about the U.S. Chamber Foundation's Future of Data in K-12 Education initiative and its esteemed working group members, visit: uschamberfoundation.org/future-of-data
Photo by Gary Tou on Unsplash