There has always been a big focus in the nonprofit community on helping improve public schools in America. Recently, I have seen a lot of information written about how foundations and others are helping schools use data to learn about what works and to drive results.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is focused in two areas for their education strategy. The first is ensuring that high school prepares students for college, and the second is ensuring that the college degree is relevant. Focusing on their "College-Ready" initiative, several points stand out to me. Their working paper from November 2008 points out that it is important to "identify a core set of standards and measures of student progress that are focused on the skills students need to succeed in higher education and good jobs." The foundation also says it will focus on "designing measures, observational and evaluation tools, and data systems that can fairly and accurately identify effective teaching." Finally, they state "We need better data to tell us if we are making progress...We need evidence, and we need to go where it takes us."

We can also see evidence of measurement in action at the school level through the deployment of SchoolStat at several schools. SchoolStat is a modification of the much touted CompStat program that allowed the New York City Police Department to reduce crime so effectively in the early 90s. This program has been used at the City level with a program called CitiStat, and recently has been used in schools as well. The Philadelphia School district as well as Baltimore and Washington, DC have deployed a version of this program that focuses on metrics to identify problem areas and create solutions. These programs have shown demonstrated results in reducing teacher absences, decreasing student absences, and increasing student performance.

Further, Fulton County Schools in Atlanta has received awards for the performance of its Balanced Scorecard program. Using measurement, they have aligned the teachers and staff in their schools to what matters, and they have shared best practices based on what the data has told them. Each week, I read about other schools implementing the Balanced Scorecard. San Francisco was in the news last week on this topic.

It is exciting to see performance management and data-driven decision making enter the public sector, and it gives us some hope that the ongoing efforts to improve our schools are beginning to leverage technology and information through measurement to make a difference and document the factors that helped make the improvement. I look forward to reading about more successes in the future.