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By Dr. Harry Tennant
Monday, January 3, 2011 Pass It On Education Tools: Data First At first, the title of the website below was a bit off-putting. "Data First" rang in contradiction to "Students First", a mantra of properly focused educators. Can both come first? Are they mutually exclusive? Can one come first without the other? Mere semantics?!? No matter....this is a powerful website with a bunch of rich information designed to improve schools. As they describe it: "Data First was created with the idea that data matters. Education data, used well, can help school board members and everyone else who cares about education to make good decisions – ones based, not on the loudest voices or the latest theories, but on the facts about what students need and how they are currently doing." "...designed to guide people through the questions they should be asking about their schools, and point to the data sources that offer answers." "...to link visitors to data they can use about schools, and to teach them how to use it better.""...Data First is brought to you by the Center for Public Education – an initiative of the National School Boards Association." Posted at 12:05 PM Keywords: Pass It On Education Tools , Pass It On , Data First , Accountability 1 Comments |
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Harry Tennant said... Data First vs Students First...It depends upon the question. If the question is, In what ways should we change to improve education?, Data First suggests relying on observation and science to answer that question rather than gut feel. If the question is, What are schools for?, clearly they do not exist to gather data. A much better answer is that schools exist to benefit the students. But then "Students First" leads us into sticky questions like, do we support public education in order to enable each individual student to flourish or do we support it for societal goals such as making democracy work better or supplying a skilled workforce into the economy? Monday, January 3, 2011 1:00 PM |