Education Week - September 6, 2017 - 24

COMMENTARY

18
HOW TO DEFINE PUBLIC
SCHOOLING IN THE AGE
OF CHOICE?

19
WHAT MAKES A SCHOOL
GOOD? IT'S MORE THAN TEST
SCORES

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

We Need Better
Education Data

By Chris Elmendorf & Darien Shanske
onsider the following scenario: You are a school superintendent very interested
in expanding pre-K in your
district. You review the literature on the subject and find
it inconclusive. A veteran
school board member tells
you that the district did have a pre-K program
25 years ago; it lasted for three years and then
was discontinued. You wonder how those children did, including after they left school. And
you ask the state for help.
The state should know lots about those students: their standardized-test scores, whether
they voted, their criminal records, their income, etc. The state replies that it does not
have this information collected in a manner
that is accessible. And, to add insult to injury,
the state explains that it would not release
the information anyway because of privacy
concerns.
You decide to proceed with pre-K in your
district regardless, but, so that future researchers can learn something, you ask the
state if you can assign pupils to the pre-K
class through a random lottery given that
there will not be enough spots for everyone.
The state refuses. A local education researcher
asks if you can work together to at least keep
track of key administrative data for the children within and without the program. To do
that, you need help from the state, but again
the state refuses.
That scenario is neither fanciful nor uncommon. Despite some improvements, many
states do not maintain the data in a usable
manner that education researchers need,
much less do they use program rollouts as
a regular opportunity to conduct controlled
experiments. On the one hand, this failure
makes sense. Organizing and managing administrative data is not costless, especially
if privacy concerns are properly taken into
account. Furthermore, as a matter of practical politics, not much of a constituency exists
for the collection of good data that will yield
conclusions many years in the future-a time
frame that for most politicians or administrators makes no sense.
At the same time, the failure to generate
high-quality data is untenable. Education is
by far the biggest expenditure made by state
and local governments. The cost of collecting
good data and making the information available is not even a rounding error compared
with state and local education budgets. It
would be one thing if educational researchers
were doing well enough with the data they
have, but the expert consensus is that they
are not. And this is not because there is a lack

of researchers or analytic methods. (Indeed,
something of a revolution is going on in the
social sciences when it comes to the use of
administrative data. For example, a muchcelebrated recent study by Raj Chetty and colleagues demonstrated that social mobility in
the United States depends greatly on where
a child grows up, based on careful analysis of
years of tax-return data.)
If education research is not to be left behind,
states need to devote resources to collecting
the data and making those data available
to researchers. There are models for doing
so. In some Nordic countries, each citizen is
given an administrative-record number that
is used throughout the government. When
a researcher requests data, the government
provides the data, but using a different set of
numbers to protect privacy. That arrangement
has enabled education research that would be
difficult or impossible to carry out elsewhere,
such as studying the effect of publicly provided day care on labor-market outcomes decades later-just the question our hypothetical superintendent was hoping to answer.
The policy prescription is clear: States
should aim to collect and disseminate firstrate educational data. A good place to start on
this project is with the checklist provided by
the nonprofit Data Quality Campaign, which
emphasizes the record-keeping arrangements
needed to track students over time and across
administrative databases.
States should also organize themselves so
that opportunities for controlled experiments
are not squandered. In many cases, states
already roll out programmatic changes in
pieces; it would not cost much more to do so
in a manner that enables credible inferences
about the reform's effects.
What if a state refuses to take reasonable
steps to assess the effectiveness of its biggest
outlay? Can the states be forced into self-reflection? We think the answer is yes.
Virtually every state constitution provides
for a system of free public schools. Most states
have been sued under those provisions, with
the plaintiffs claiming that states are not distributing funds equitably or just not spending
an adequate amount. Plaintiffs have a mixed
record in such suits, though it should be noted
that many states changed their educational
system because of the threat of such a lawsuit.
As a result, there are many states where the
constitutional provision concerning education
has been litigated and in which the courts
have held that the state has a legally enforceable "duty of care" with respect to education.
We argue in a forthcoming law review article
that if this duty of care means anything, it
must at least mean that states take reason-

24 | EDUCATION WEEK | September 6, 2017 | www.edweek.org/go/commentary

Jon Krause for Education Week

If education
research is not to
be left behind,
states need to
devote resources
to collecting the
data and making
those data
available to
researchers."

able efforts to enable the assessment of how
their public education systems are performing. That is, leaving aside whether states must
spend more money or spend more fairly, they
must at least have some reasonable system
in place to assess their compliance with the
constitutional command to provide a decent
public education.
Especially in states with courts that have
proven willing to impose dramatic solutions,
such as spending and other mandates, we
think that even the threat of litigation should
motivate state officials to provide education
researchers the data they need. To be clear,
our vision of states' duty of care with respect
to education wouldn't turn children into lab
rats. States would still have to protect student records from privacy-compromising
disclosures, and state officials-not researchers-would continue to set priorities.
But whatever else the states may owe to disadvantaged children in particular, at least
the states must make it possible to learn
whether their efforts to better educate those
children are doing any good. n
CHRIS ELMENDORF and DARIEN SHANSKE are both
professors of law at the University of California, Davis.

http://www.edweek.org/go/commentary

Education Week - September 6, 2017

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - September 6, 2017