Next fall I will be teaching secondary school English, and in order to be effective I’m going to need to brush up on my math. As I was starting the process of applying to Teach for America, one of the reasons I kept citing for why I wanted to go into education was that effective schools and programs (like TFA) measure whether they’re successful at what they’re doing. This isn’t an entirely new phenomenon in education, but we’re no where near to realizing the full the power of measuring what we do U.S. schools, seeing if it benefits students, and adjusting things accordingly. Fortunately there are a whole slew of districts, policy shops, and nonprofits working on figuring out what we’re not measuring, determining how to measure it, maintain that information, and act on it.
Take this report that my humble employer, the Center for American Progress, and College Summit released last week. The authors explain that while many public high schools have a rigorous college preparation curriculum that includes Advanced Placement classes and the like, smart successful students often make it to their first year of college and find themselves totally adrift, unprepared for the academic expectations of higher ed. High schools, despite their best intentions, often don’t know whether or not they’re preparing students for success in college because they don’t keep track of how those students perform in their “13th” year. Simply put, they don’t measure the outcome of their work. It’s a matter of counting.
Now, building a data system that follows students from secondary school to potentially far-flung colleges is not trivial, but the principle—take note of what you do, measure, and make adjustments to better meet your goals—is one of those simple ideas that made for a lot of successful projects over the past decade.
The business community is generally out ahead on this whole counting and measuring thing, but it’s also worth noting that much of the exponential growth of web-based and social media technologies over the past 10 years is due, fundamentally, to the ability to use computers to measure what people are doing and craft tools and products that fit people’s needs. Google does this, incrementally, billions of times day. Similar story for most everything else you clicked on around the Internet today. But in a whole variety of other fields, counting has been around for decades, and its impact has snowballed in the face of cheap, fast computing, and the basic acceptance that if you want to understand a problem, you need data.
Atul Gwande’s Better offers a terrific tour of how measurement has improved various corners of medicine since the middle of the 20th century. Hospitals have beaten back onslaughts of drug-resistant bacteria by persuading everyone to wash his or her hands and counting the results. The introduction of the Apgar score, which enumerates on a 0-10 scale the health of newborn infants upon delivery, lead to a dramatic upswing the in the quality of care for infants and dramatic upswing in survival rates, which are now about 8 times better than they were in the 1930s. And the 90 percent survival rates for U.S. combat troops wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan is due in large part to the fact that military physicians diligently record copious information on injuries, treatments, and outcomes—so they can constantly find ways to improve on their success.
The next big step in education and in medicine is to take what we’ve counted, standardize the information, and compare it. That means national testing and data standards for education and interoperable electronic health records for medicine. Fortunately, there’s federal money for both of those projects: $4.35 billion for schools and $19 billion health information technology.