Posted October 04, 2018 07:06:16The National Governors Association is encouraging states to start sharing data about school quality with students, teachers, and parents, to help them improve their schools.
The goal is to better understand and respond to the challenges facing students, to make better use of the data and make the most informed decisions possible, said Nancy Burden, a former president of the National Governors association.
She called the initiative “one of the most important things we can do for our children.”
The Association is working with states to share data that’s currently unavailable, said Stephanie Coats, a spokeswoman for the association.
The data will help schools and parents make better decisions about how to manage school resources, the states say.
The states are partnering with the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to make that data publicly available.
The group is sharing data on student achievement in state- and district-level grades to help improve schools.
Some states already have publicly available information about student achievement.
But states also want to make sure that the data is as accurate as possible.
States will receive an initial $5 million from the National Education Foundation, which is supporting the initiative.
The association hopes to expand the program in the coming years.
“It’s a really big deal,” said Nancy D. Schmitt, executive director of the American Federation for Children, which works on educational policy issues for the public.
She also works with states on education data.
“We have the opportunity to be part of the national conversation about how the data we collect on schools is used.”
The idea for sharing data has been around for years, and states have long shared data about the students and teachers in their schools, Schmitt said.
But sharing it now has the added benefit of allowing states to make informed decisions about which schools to keep, and how to improve them.
Some schools have been improving over the past several years, said David Smith, a researcher at the National Conference of State Legislatures.
The improvement is so strong that schools have reported a 3 percent drop in teacher turnover since the start of the year, he said.
And in the last two years, more than half of the states have reported improving their student achievement at least 1 point or better, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a U.S. Department of Education report on school performance.
That data is currently unavailable because it’s not part of a national report, said Schmitt.
Schools in many states report better results than others because of a combination of factors, including the efforts of teachers and administrators, school leaders and parents.
For example, more students are attending more schools, the number of teachers is higher, more districts have improved attendance and the number and types of students are being counted, she said.
States also will use the data to make improvements in ways that benefit students, said Smith.
For instance, schools that have more teachers and more students in classrooms can improve student learning and test scores.
The National Governors group says that, because it takes a lot of data to do research on the quality of a school, schools can often take decades to see a change in student performance.
The report found that in the first six years of a state’s data collection, there were about 11.6 million school-level indicators, or data points, in the system.
But in the second year, there are more than 8.7 million school indicators, the report said.
Schools need data on a wide variety of indicators, from students’ academic achievement to school size, to monitor their progress, Schmit said.
For that reason, states have made it a goal to collect more data about their schools over time.
“That’s the best way to be able to have more robust data to improve,” Schmitt added.
“And that’s what we’re trying to do now.”
She said that information about students’ scores will help teachers and principals decide which schools are the best places for their students.
For teachers, the data could help to know if teachers are effective and effective at communicating with students and how well they are working with students to make the best use of their time.
For principals, the information could help them to better prepare them for what is coming their way in the future, she added.
A new federal mandate that requires states to provide data about students to schools could help improve the information available to schools, said Mark Rosenbaum, executive vice president of research at the American Association of University Women.
Rosenbaum is the director of research for the Association of State and Territorial Education Administrators, a non-profit that advocates for school accountability.
But he said that’s just the beginning.
For now, schools are reporting on the most recent data they have and will continue to do so, Rosenbaum said.
He said states can use that information to make smart decisions about the schools that they keep and the students who come after them.
Schools should be able, Rosenstein said, to provide teachers with more detailed
