Building a better data culture can be the path to better results and greater equity in schools. But what do we mean by data? Your students are not just statistics. They aren't simply a set of numbers or faceless dots on a proficiency scale. They are vibrant collections of experiences, thoughts, perspectives, emotions, wants, and dreams. And taken…

The Grand Challenges for Assessment in Higher Education project is a collaborative effort of 10 endorsing organizations and over 400 volunteers to increase the extent to which assessment (1) supports equity; (2) is visible, actionable, and drives innovation; and (3) guides rapid improvements in pedagogy (Singer-Freeman and Robinson 2020). Several…

While there are many different types of education data, policymakers and education leaders often place heavy emphasis on data from large-scale quantitative measures, such as annual state assessments. But data from these sources alone do not provide a complete picture of learning and are often not well suited to informing improvements at the local…

State postsecondary education data systems are vital assets for policymakers, researchers, and the public. The State Higher Education Executive Officers Association's (SHEEO) Communities of Practice project builds upon SHEEO's efforts to measure the capacity and effective use of state postsecondary data systems and provides states with…

As federal funding for summer learning as a pandemic recovery strategy phases out, state governments face decisions about their future role in supporting students' access to quality summer learning opportunities. This brief is based on the full report, "How States Are Expanding Quality Summer Learning Opportunities," and summarizes…

Institutions of higher education are asked to consider how their work can advance equity in institutional outcomes. Assessment, too, has been asked to consider the ways in which traditional student assessment "privileges and validates certain types of learning and evidence of learning over others" (Montenegro and Jankowski 2017, p. 5).…

Parents and the public use accountability data to judge if schools are doing a good or a bad job educating their students. However, using the current data, schools perceived as "good" tend to be in better-resourced districts and enroll higher percentages of wealthy and white students. Schools perceived as "bad" tend to be in…

The DaSy Center supports all 56 U.S. states and territories and provides individualized and cross-state technical assistance (TA) on data linking and integration. Early intervention (Part C) and early childhood special education (Part B 619) state programs are interested in linking their data to address critical questions about program quality in…

This brief describes how several commonly used per-pupil funding measures derived from federal data include passthrough funding in the numerator but exclude students attached to this funding from the denominator, artificially inflating per-pupil ratios. Three forms of passthrough funding for students not educated by the school district where they…

Care and social-emotional supports are of concern for school district leaders who want to create a caring culture throughout their district. In their study of central office leaders, Kate Kennedy and Jeff Walls found that caring leadership is complex, that school district leaders practice care in collaboration with others, that partnerships with…

In this article, we adopt culturally relevant perspectives on developmental science that acknowledge and value the diversity of backgrounds and experiences of young children and their families to identify opportunities to advance the measurement of early childhood development. We focus on direct child assessments that can drive more equitable…

Continuous improvement methods, widely used in fields such as medicine, can help educators identify and try out adjustments in practice, known as "change ideas," which contribute to better outcomes and more equitable systems for students. Since 2018, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has invested in 24 organizations across the…

Meaningful change towards antiracist practices take time. There are no quick fixes. Quick workshops on implicit bias and microaggressions rarely lead to lasting changes in teaching practices. Equity QUantified In Participation (EQUIP) learning communities organize faculty members to work together to promote antiracist teaching. Equity analytics…

While the field advocates for a diversified and comprehensive professional role (National Association of School Psychologists, 2020), school psychologists have long spent most of their time in assessment-related activities (Farmer et al., 2021), averaging about eight cognitive evaluations monthly (Benson et al., 2020). Assessment practices have…

In Part 1 of this series, the authors briefly reviewed some challenges inherent in using standardized tools with students who are not well represented in norming data. To help readers clearly conceptualize the framework steps, the authors present two case studies that showcase how a nonstandardized approach to assessment can be individualized to…