California Education Dialogue

A public policy dialogue produced by Information Renaissance
with support from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation,
IBM Corporation and Intel Corporation


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Briefing Book

CROSS CUTTING ISSUES

Data

Good decision making and management requires good, consistent and unbiased data. Well-designed data collection and analysis aligned across the educational system can help to identity strengths and weaknesses, set effective plans and goals, and check whether goals and standards have been met; they are essential for maintaining accountability. Data may, for example, be about achievement, instruction, perceptions or student demographics. It may be used in forecasting and planning, and to guide interventions for individual students as well as resource use for schools, professional development, curriculum and other areas.

"Effective use of data by educators and their community will change how they respond to accountability demands. When timely and useful data are available to educators, and effective interventions are at their fingertips, the focus of accountability can move toward 'fixing the problem' rather than 'fixing the blame.'" (Education Commission of the States; see second entry)

Related Issues:

Data is related to many of the topics in the Master Plan; the links below lead to pages on this site that give more information in selected areas.

If your organization has material that would be useful for the online dialogue but is not included in the preceding list, please e-mail a URL to <camp-info@network-democracy.org>.