Sooooolo happpy!!! For Ange. For Son (who doesn’t look like he has much left). For this whole team and fanbase!

...if for no other reason than it undercuts one of the virtues of federalism & local control: the possibility of learning from a pluralistic approach to schooling. We can empower states & local communities while leaving intact our ability to learn from that variety. 12/x

I say this as someone who has been plenty critical of the quantification of schooling and learning: crippling ED's ability to collect and disseminate stats about our schools makes all states and districts worse off.... 11/

www.hup.harvard.edu/books/978067...

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Same is true of early federal longitudinal data sets. The first ones were bloated, cumbersome, (and some how still omitted key variables like race!), and didn't produce much insight. But those efforts begot HSB, NELS, ELS, HLS, etc.... 10/

Granted, even w/ ED trying to coordinate thousands of school districts in the US, it took a very long time to get the standard data reporting practices we have. Efforts in the 1950s toward a "common core" of data were a mess but led to: HEGIS (1966); IPEDS (1986) CCD (1986) 9/

For a contemporary ex of the babel of ed statistics, districts/states have very different definitions of what counts as having "attended" school for the day. This was especially challenging during Covid! Does virtual access mean you're always present?! 8/

That's the thing about the quantification of schooling: it's not self-evident what or how (or how often) you should count/measure things in schools. A lot of different ways make sense! So you need coordination and uniform definitions! 7/

"...but the records of so many single experiences, incapable of being aggregated or contrasted with each other, and so their chief value is lost; especially is this true of educational statistics in this country." -Eaton "Educational Lessons of Statistics" (1872) 6/

Here's 2nd Commissioner of Ed, John Eaton (1872), "It too often happens when the thought of keeping records occurs, the workers in a given field adopt methods so diverse and incomplete that they form..." 5/

This history is significant but the argument doesn't/shouldn't turn on the fact that this was an old practice. It should turn on the basic insight embedded in the practice. i.e. why we thought *centralized* collection and dissemination of statistics was important in the first place 4/

You can argue that we need to reduce or "turn back" federal overreach in education. Fine. But I'm not clear how that argument can include eliminating the collection and dissemination of information about the nation's schools. That's been there since the beginning. 3/

Federal data collection in education goes back to 1867, which means it is basically as old as American school systems. Yes there was schooling before 1867, but only MA/VT/DC had compulsory school laws at the time. Schooling was largely informal & voluntary. 2/