Recommended Reading: Harnessing the disruptive power of data in education

“Most school data and analysis remains a black box affair, unavailable for easy use by parents, policymakers and even teachers and principals for making smart decisions,” the ever-insightful RiShawn Biddle writes at the Dropout Nation blog this week. “Far too many school data systems leave out useful information, explain it in the kind of jargon most parents and laymen cannot understand, or are organized in ways that are useful to no one.”

Like Yahoo did to Web searches and Amazon did to retail, Biddle said it’s time to harness the disruptive power of data to fix education in America.

“But we cannot count just on the force of data alone,” Biddle writes. “We will need more private-sector and nonprofit players to get into the business of aggregating data and breaking it down into usable chunks. And we will need community-based family information centers that can help families and communities to understand what the data means for kids and for their neighborhoods.”