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In the UK, July 7th was the day of the “Government Transparency: Opening Up Public Services” briefing, which began with the Prime Minister’s Letter to the Cabinet Ministers on transparency and open data. The letter touched on accomplishments made in the last year and then briefly explained new goals for the one ahead, and was quickly followed up with its public counterpart, an article in The Telegraph. The purpose was to lay out the planned release of government data over the coming months in the areas of health care, education, criminal justice, transportation and public spending. The community responded in real-time with the hashtag #openuk.
In the Telegraph article, David Cameron outlined three ways in which transparency would result in a “complete revolution.” “First,” he stated, “it will enable choice, particularly for patients and parents” by providing the means by which the choice of a school or hospital might be thoroughly informed. The second was a rise in standards for all public services, due to a welcome “race to the top as they [professionals] learn from the best” as they become aware of the performance of their peers. The third reason for the move to transparency and open data that Cameron gave was the benefits to the economy. He ensured that more transparency would help not only to save money by heavily reducing waste, but also to promote enterprise. Putting the economic value of open data at £6 billion, Cameron then reasoned that this is because the possibilities of free enterprise are endless (he was careful not to elbow out established industry from the equation).
This will affect the British education system in a few specific ways. From January 2012, data will be made available to parents showing them how effective their school is at teaching students currently at high, average and low attainment levels across a variety of subjects. Parent access to the National Pupil Database, an anonymized collection point for data on school performance that will allow for comparisons between schools, will also be open from June 2012. Strengthening the set of data available for use by parents will also come from a parent portal, which will align school spending data, school performance data, pupil cohort data and Ofsted judgments. This will come in January 2012 and the information will be searchable by postcode. And even earlier will be the release of data on apprenticeships paid for by the government, ordered by organization and success rate. The last will be released this month.
Jeevan Vasagar, education editor for The Guardian, said that the creation of a parent portal for school comparison will offer “a more rounded portrait of a school’s performance than its position in league tables. Depending on the level of data provided, parents will be able to judge how good the teaching is – both from the Ofsted report and data on how much progress children are making. Providing families with more easily accessible information is crucial to the government’s ambition to drive up standards by increasing school choice.”
After following the briefing on Twitter, Tony Hirst responded by stating that “the real issues are that the data that will be made available will in all likelihood be summary statistic data, which actually masks much of the information you’d need to make an informed decision; and if there is any meaningful intelligence in the data, or its summary statistics, you’ll need to know how to interpret the statistics, or even just read the pretty graphs, in order to take anything meaningful form them.” Indeed, data on its own is not much use. But Hirst also sees an opportunity for private companies to come forward and take the necessary steps to make the data more accessible; a role that academic (institutional and national) and learning (student- and teacher-based) analytics can play. In fact, the increased availability of data would make those analytics more robust, and provide a method for presenting that data to the population in a way that is much easier to understand. By employing data not just gleaned from individual institutions, but also that of the government, analytics systems such as ours can much more quickly provide an image of multiple (possibly even the majority of) institutions.
And lest we forget, the point that solitary datasets are of little use has already been made evident, anyway, by the current model used by the UK government to present information on school performance: an annually-released Excel mega-file. Sure, the data is there, but the format is impractical, and on the most basic level, not useable. Thankfully this call for more transparency is a step in the right direction, even if it one of the first.
Transparency may not be sufficient alone, but it is an imperative step. A week before the British Government announced its plans for transparency, the US Department of Education revealed its own move in that direction in the form of the College Affordability and Transparency Center. However, the tool is severely limited—although it does provide students, parents and others information about the cost of colleges by sector, it gives no information whatsoever about the quality of the education each institution provides, perceived or otherwise, or the ROI of a degree obtained at a particular college. Thus, here in the US we are still left without a “more rounded portrait” of our higher ed institutions. The danger of this information standing alone is implied by Watson Scott Swail, the President and CEO of the Educational Policy Institute who served on the College Board in the 1990s, when he states that “colleges and universities live, in part, by the Chivas Regal effect. That is, the more expensive they are, the higher their perceived value and ROI. They simply ‘must’ be better. We know this isn’t even close to true, but people believe it.”
What the US Department of Education has done so far, though, is a starting point. But there is so much more to the equation than just the cost. The British government appears to understand that the recipe requires more than one ingredient, and has already dedicated itself to creating a culture of transparency that will be enforced by legislation. And of course, it must also continue to determine how this information will be made as useful as possible to as many people as possible. With that being said, however, there is still the possibility of a pushback from institutions that feel they may suffer from “bad” information, and concerns over hidden data. But overall, greater transparency provides more space for academic and learning analytics to form a substantial piece of the puzzle. Hopefully in the long-term, the example set from across the pond will lead to better access to information, a better understanding of how to use that information, better institutions, better educations, and a much better off population.
Harriet May hmay@loomlearning.com
