Data is about more than facts and figures. Behind those walls of numbers and reams of paper is information about real people making real choices, and to lose sight of that in public policymaking is death.
That’s especially so in education, as brightbeam CEO Chris Stewart pointed out yesterday in a live session at the digital EdPalooza conference, hosted by ExcelinEd.
Joining Stewart were brightbeam activists Natasha Dunn, Chioma Oruh, Tanesha Peeples, and Garris Stroud.
At the event, Stewart announced the beta launch of Why Proficiency Matters, a new brightbeam initiative to track the racial gaps in academic proficiency.
But Why Proficiency Matters is merely one part of a larger story Stewart and his team want to tell. It’s a story about real kids, real families, real school communities dealing with real problems. Their problems may not be the same in every place, but the use of data allows us to see which problems persist across communities so that communities can hold their leaders accountable.
