Of course I remember having you in my class.

At the beginning of the Great Depression, high school graduation rates in the United States were 30 percent. In 1940, it was 50 percent. This educational leap forward is the lede for David Leonhardt’s piece in the New York Times Magazine on the similar shift during the ongoing Great Recession: more Americans are enrolling in college, and especially in community colleges.

The trouble is that while some 70.1 percent of new high school graduates started college last fall, many people already enrolled in community colleges don’t finish. Leonhardt reports:

Less than a third of all students who enroll in community colleges with the intention of getting a two-year degree — a degree leading to jobs in nursing, auto repair, preschool education — ever do so at any college, statistics suggest.

On top of that, data on students in community college is apparently scarce. A CAP colleague explains that the federal student loan and Pell grant structure is designed to get students enrolled, but does little to track them on their way to a degree or credential.

While that’s unfortunate, it’s not surprising. Lack of data is a consistent problem in many corners of the education system. Another CAP report demonstrates the problems that arise from the fact that most high schools only pay attention to how many of their students move on to college, not how well prepared they were to make the transition. Fortunately, there are success stories of schools that have recalibrated their learning goals to ensure that students aren’t just exposed to college preparation work, but that they actually learn how to do it.

Now TFA is all about capturing as much student tracking data as possible, within the context of a given year. That’s no small order, but the year is the scope of your work as a teacher. What if, as a teacher, you kept track of this information from year to year, and were able to follow your student through the school system to see how they were doing in the subject you taught? And what if the district also kept data on college enrollment, and those systems synchronized with college data. What if, years down the road, you knew what role you and other teachers played in shaping that student’s education?

Complicated, sure, but it’s just text in a database.