Education is Everybody’s Business

This was the theme of one of the speakers (Lois Adams-Rogers) at Monday’s ABEC conference (Arizona Business and Education Coalition).  Education is a community collaboration.  As usual, what caught my ear was the talk of data and its purpose in the world of education policy decision-making.  One speaker (Tim Waters) likened education to baseball – awash in statistics, but maybe not all decisions made are driven by data.  Should education decisions be driven by data?  More so than they are now?  Should the “data” in “data-driven decision-making” be more than just descriptive?  Should it be research resulting in causal connections?  Questions to chew on…

Another speaker (David Garcia) reminded us that our general perception in Arizona is that policy is developed with little or no data, whereas reality is that politics are rarely influenced by research.  We need research to get from data to usable information.