Dive Brief:

• Harold O. Levy, executive director of the non-profit Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, argues in a Wall Street Journal editorial that despite his support for the "Big Data" trend, he believes educators aren't using the stats properly — specifically when it comes to understanding low-income students.
• Areas he sees data misused include attendance, college graduation rates, and retention.
• Levy, a former New York City schools chancellor, argues that summer school is the most cost-effective strategy for low-performing schools, yet for some reason, many schools are not requiring it.  

Dive Insight:

From Levy's perspective, many problems — and their solutions — are identified in data, however, for some reason that knowledge is being underutilized. He shows this with the summer school example, where he writes: "It's rare to find a school administrator who is comfortable parsing statistics or stays ahead of the academic literature. So these insights go undeveloped, and students who could be saved are not."

Levy highlights this with an example of how data on college outcomes is ignored. According to him, of students that scored in the top-quarter of standardized tests, only 59% who identified as low-income graduated from college, compared with the 77% who came from wealthier families.

For Levy, it is mind-boggling that this data exists but it is not influencing policy. Despite knowing that low-income students are not graduating from college at the same rate as higher-income students who are scoring the same on standardized tests, he says there is very little policy or infrastructure working to diminish this gap. The Jacob Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Act, for example, only received $5 million in 2014 and nothing for the three years prior.