Education has a data problem.

At the end of every academic year, school leaders routinely ponder what they could have done differently to better help their students succeed. Mountains of data are studied with charts and graphs plotted, but it is difficult at a system level to use final grades and test scores to figure out what exactly should change and why. At the classroom level, teachers spend an exorbitant amount of time distilling an entire year of information into a few sentences on student report cards, even though the intervention window has closed. For their part, parents are commonly surprised by the contents of these very same end-of-year reports and are left scratching their heads about what might have happened had they known earlier that their children were struggling.

This dichotomy of rich summative data but countless unanswered questions is the result of a growing pattern in education: schools have enough data to know that there is a problem, but they lack the right data at the right time to know when and how to address it.

Administrators, teachers, and parents share a common desire to know more comprehensively how students are progressing—or not—at any time during the school year. However, schools depend largely on lagging indicators, which only identify issues after they arise. State assessments and report cards, for example, arrive too late to be actionable. Summative and formative assessments are better but still require a trade-off: time spent assessing instead of teaching. Schools need leading indicators of learning progression that flag at-risk students before they fall behind.

Read the full article about actionable education data by Aaron Wertman at EdSurge.