A socio-legal analysis of the UK governance regime for data collected from children at school for teaching and learning contrasts the government-mandated data collection by schools to inform educational policy and planning with data processed and shared with third parties by commercial EdTech providers. We find the former is effectively governed…

School attendance and absenteeism are critical targets of educational policies and practices that often depend heavily on aggregated attendance/absenteeism data. School attendance/absenteeism data in aggregated form, in addition to having suspect quality and utility, minimizes individual student variation, distorts detailed and multilevel…

Despite enacting well-intentioned policies to improve teacher recruitment and retention, many states continue to face significant staffing challenges, particularly in high-need schools and hard-to-staff subjects such as math, science, and special education. Two years ago, the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) set out to explore the…

School attendance/absenteeism (SA/A) is a crucial indicator of health and development in youth but educational policies and health-based practices in this area rely heavily on a simple metric of physical presence or absence in a school setting. SA/A data suffer from problems of quality (reliability, construct validity, data integrity) and utility…

As awareness of bias in educational machine learning applications increases, accountability for technologies and their impact on educational equality is becoming an increasingly important constituent of ethical conduct and accountability in education. This article critically examines the relationship between so-called algorithmic fairness and…

While the use of numbers in governance has a long history, the kinds of numbers we now produce enable a range of new possibilities for monitoring, regulation and policy decision-making. Global policy actors are now calling for a steep increase in investment in education data. The growing trust in numbers has been critiqued by education policy…

This paper contributes to a growing body of research on the increasing datafication of schooling, which has become a salient topic in comparative education and education policy research. Specifically, we address the rising scholarly concern about the meaning of (comparing) contexts as bounded localities facing an increasingly fluid and generative…

This knowledge brief is part of a continuing series designed to inform California education leaders about new research findings on key state policy topics. It summarizes recent findings on improving the access to, and the use of, teacher workforce data in California, and focuses on the importance of instituting a statewide teacher data system that…

As support continues to grow across the country and across the political spectrum for the federal student-level data network (SLDN) proposed in the College Transparency Act (CTA), IHEP partnered with AEM Education Services, with input from RTI International, to further build out a roadmap to support the implementation of the SLDN. "Frameworks…

Dual enrollment is a complex policy issue and is increasingly of interest to state policymakers. Adequate data and data systems are critical to informing dual enrollment policy, yet the data at the federal level and many state data systems suffer from common challenges and lack the capacity to address dual enrollment policy. We review the…

One lasting legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic may be more students attending online classes at both traditional and fully online colleges. The efficacy of online education remains unproven, especially for students with academic or other challenges. And yet, both students and policymakers lack the data they need to assess whether online classes are…

For the last five years, the California Department of Education (CDE) has reported a steady increase in homeless K-12 students in the state. In the academic year 2018-2019, over 207,000 California K-12 students were without appropriate, consistent and stable housing. Unhoused K-12 students are disproportionately LGBTQ+, migrants, students of…

The policy decisions of state, district and school educators affect the extent to which students have access to high-quality practices. This is especially relevant for students with disabilities and their families. This article summarizes a presentation made at the 2019 AAIDD conference and proposes an operational role for policy makers. Two…

Since the 1990s, European school policy has been steered by management dreams that systematic monitoring and assessment would guide schools and society toward a future of greater quality, efficiency, and growth. This article, drawing on Jean Baudrillard, explores whether it makes sense to rearticulate this dream of optimization by assessment in…

Psychology and economics are powerful sources of expert knowledge in contemporary governance. Social and emotional learning (SEL) is becoming a priority in education policy in many parts of the world. Based on the enumeration of students' 'noncognitive' skills, SEL consists of a 'psycho-economic' combination of psychometrics with economic…