Shoes? Yes! Heartbreakingly, the answer to the question is shoes.
Why am I telling you this story? While it’s tempting to look at education and medical data and see numbers, charts and graphs I hope we remember that there is always a person, a family, a community and a story behind the data. Education and medical researchers undoubtedly need to delve into the numbers and charts to identify connections and causality that lead to the development of treatments and solutions. But for the rest of us, knowing the story behind the data leads to empathy and spurs us to action. I previously worked for an education data warehouse company: here are a couple of stories told by education data that I encountered in my time there.
The product sold by my company was used by state education agencies and school districts to collect attendance data that, by law, must be reported to state education agencies and the Federal government’s Department of Education. While analyzing attendance data, the data manager for one urban school district noticed that within one family with two children in the elementary school, one of the two boys was absent every day. But they took turns: A would be out on Monday and B would be out on Tuesday, etc. The school couldn’t figure out why this was happening; the family was new to the school district and the boys weren’t forthcoming with information. The administrators at the school thought that perhaps a parent was sick and one child had to stay home every day to care for them or younger siblings. Or maybe the parents weren’t English speakers and needed someone at home to assist with any contact outside the home. Eventually it came to light, sadly, that the boys shared one pair of shoes and only one of them was able to use the shoes each day, so they took turns attending school.
Unlike many of the underlying problems in medicine and education that are exposed by data this one was easy to fix. The school district took action; a second pair of shoes was obtained and a plan for providing the family with shoes and other items as needed was put in place.
In another example from the education world, school districts are required to report graduation data to both state and Federal agencies and, while you would think this is a straightforward calculation, it turns out that like many calculations involving people, it quickly gets complicated. The standard calculation for graduation rate is to take the group of students starting 9th grade (called a cohort) and determine the percentage of those that graduate four years later after accounting for those that leave and join the district during the four years.
The superintendent of one district knew that his graduation rate was problematic but he couldn’t generate much community interest in addressing the problem until he made the data and the problem so visible that it was impossible for the community to ignore. At the next year’s graduation celebration, he included an empty chair for every student who started with the cohort four years ago but didn’t graduate with their cohort. The number of empty chairs was overwhelming! Faced with a data problem made obvious the community worked together to come up with solutions and improve the district’s graduation rate.
While medical data is captured under different institutional rules and Federal and state laws than education data, it still holds that there are people behind the numbers and we have a greater impact on change when the story, people or community behind the data is made as obvious as possible. Using data to tell a story as it relates to people, and making the story as obvious as possible, is an effective method to get people on board with change and spur them to action.
And just an FYI – the wealth of education data collected by the Federal government is available to everyone through the National Center for Education Statistics at their website: National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Home Page, a part of the U.S. Department of Education
Some of this data might even be useful to the medical world – they both involve people and their stories after all.