The Information Edge

Educators at all levels are more interested than ever in tapping the potential of electronic data to accelerate their students' achievement.

The nation has made dramatic progress in developing computerized data systems that can reliably guide education decisionmaking, but it still has plenty of work to do before those systems can fulfill their potential to accelerate student achievement, Technology Counts 2006 has found.

The federal No Child Left Behind Act has touched off a boom in school data collection. As a matter of necessity, states and school districts have responded to the 4-year-old law’s testing, teacher-quality, and accountability demands with major initiatives to upgrade their systems for collecting, managing, and analyzing electronic data .

Yet the ninth edition of Education Week ’s annual report on education technology shows that more needs to be done on the state and local levels before the mushrooming amounts of data become genuinely useful in improving student learning...