Measuring What Matters

Data-driven decision making is here to stay. Throughout the last decade, educators have come to embrace data as an indispensable tool for school improvement. Like our colleagues in industry and medicine, teachers have learned that data help us identify priorities for improvement. When schools formally measure and publicize their weaknesses, addressing problem areas acquires new urgency.

The marriage between the data-driven movement and No Child Left Behind instigated many positive actions, especially on behalf of low-performing subgroups. As Tom Peters (1987) wrote two decades ago, "What gets measured gets done." But data-based reform has also had less happy consequences. In many schools, it has morphed into an unintended obstacle to both effective instruction and an intellectually rich, forward-looking education.