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This week’s White House “College Opportunity” summit will focus on an overlooked area with enormous potential for student success: K-12 and higher education working together to improve college completion. It sounds so simple and obvious. In fact many assume it’s already happening. After all both groups of educators share the same students, just at different points in their education careers. Why wouldn’t they share information about students and coordinate efforts to help students be successful? Origins of the divide The answer lies in the separate cultures and control agencies that have grown up in both sectors over time. And, professional development and practices never included the opportunity to collectively review student performance data and how it aligned with lesson plans and expectations for what students should be learning and doing as they progress through their education. It’s time to change that. The simple act of K-12 and higher education faculty and administrators...

Data has been promoted as the great game changer in education.  Simply stated, once we have good data, we can figure out what the problems are and how to fix them to improve student success. The common wisdom states that to increase data use, you have to build better data displays, develop a data committee to engage with data, or even deliver data to every staff member’s desktop.  While these efforts are laudable, they are destined for failure. Why?  Because the current theory and practice about increasing data to inform and improve decision making ignores the human element – the receiver of the data who is supposed to comprehend, interpret, form a judgment and eventually add the information to their decision making.  It also ignores the culture of the organization where the introduction of data as a tool for decision making may be unwelcome.