From a new institutional theoretical perspective, this article explores school actors' sense-making linked to data-based decision making (DBDM) policy in general and processes of data analysis in particular. The study revealed how actors' interpretation of and response to DBDM pointed to strong and weak couplings between and within the local…

Learning analytics promise significant benefit to online education providers through improved, better-targeted student services. Much has been written about the potential of analytics and how they might be technically implemented, and various ethical considerations are published highlighting the significant potential risk of gathering,…

Speculative reform jumps the gun on notions of data-driven reform, requiring administrators to anticipate and act to ensure problems (and the data that would show them) do not materialize. Speculative reforms are incapable of delivering the outcomes they promise, as they are fueled by a fear of the future that their reforms do not extinguish. In…

Everyone who uses student information has a responsibility to maintain students' privacy and the security of their data. Ensuring student data privacy is about so much more than complying with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). While privacy must be top of mind when thinking about collecting and using personally identifiable…

Drawing on annual, nationally representative survey data from 2007-2022, I demonstrate that partisan gaps - the average differences in public opinion between Democrats and Republicans - have widened on many education issues. This pattern consistently exceeds what would be expected due to the changing demographic compositions of the parties alone.…

School attendance and absenteeism are critical targets of educational policies and practices that often depend heavily on aggregated attendance/absenteeism data. School attendance/absenteeism data in aggregated form, in addition to having suspect quality and utility, minimizes individual student variation, distorts detailed and multilevel…

Despite increasing calls to build equitable data infrastructures, the education field has yet to have a shared guideline around equitable education data management and stewardship. To address this gap, we propose one framework from the data governance literature: the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data management principles…

This systematic review presents the first synthesis of the scientific literature on estimating school and teacher/class effects on student academic performance using random-effects (RE) models with three or more levels. The review delves into the theoretical framework underpinning the estimation of educational effects, the associated statistical…

U.S. colleges and universities are under increasing pressure to appear racially diverse, but have yet to account systematically for a quickly growing contingent of multiracial-identifying students. Drawing on interviews with multiracial-identifying undergraduates at Western University, I demonstrate how everyday university practices compromise…

Data infrastructures are suffused with stories of their past, present, and future that govern their use. This article draws on research into 'OneSchool', the state schooling data infrastructure used to manage student data in Queensland, Australia. The political, social, and technical histories of OneSchool's development are shown to govern its…

School attendance/absenteeism (SA/A) is a crucial indicator of health and development in youth but educational policies and health-based practices in this area rely heavily on a simple metric of physical presence or absence in a school setting. SA/A data suffer from problems of quality (reliability, construct validity, data integrity) and utility…

Data infrastructures exist in a variety of formats. This article draws on the insights of senior personnel involved in developing a new data dashboard in one state jurisdiction in Australia. While literature on dashboards often focuses on the teachers and learners influenced by them, there is less attention to those involved in their development…

We present data from the Schools and Staffing Survey and the National Teacher and Principal Survey to document the prevalence of instructional coaching programs (ICPs) and consider how ICPs are distributed by school level, urbanicity, new teachers in a school, student enrollment, school poverty levels, student achievement levels, and state. We…

For any government, difficult choices must be made about how and where to prioritize any school construction. In the absence of data-driven decision-making, these choices typically will be made based on opinions; when that is the case, the most powerful people's opinions tend to dominate. On the other hand, data help us ensure all the children's…

The American College Personnel Association recognized the increased prominence of digital technologies in student affairs work, developing a technology competency area that includes foundational, intermediate, and advanced objectives for data use. However, as the role of technology use in student affairs practice rapidly changes, it is…