Managing with Data

Abstract

One of the most successful reform efforts in education in recent years has been a community college initiative initially sponsored by the Lumina Foundation called Achieving the Dream. The primary focus of the initiative has been to close the educational performance gap between students from disadvantaged backgrounds and the rest of the student population. Twenty-seven colleges in five states were initial participants, and in order to receive support from the Foundation, they were required to meet a number of expectations clearly stipulated in the application. The most important of these was that every college had to develop a comprehensive database that tracked each student’s academic progress from year to year on a cohort basis, with these data reported to a central information manager and shared among the participants in the initiative. In this case, “cohort basis” meant that as each class entered the college, its students became a “data set,” and each student in that cohort was followed to see what happened to both the student and to the cohort group in terms of academic progress.

“The plural of an anecdote is data.”

—Attributed to Nobel Laureate, George Stigler