Been thinking a lot about data recently and thought I would pass along a few links/thoughts.

1) Check out Jon Becker's post on data and educational leadership. Very smart stuff. Particularly this:

For our new Ed.D. program in educational leadership, I’m going to insist that we work with our students on presenting or representing data.

Excellent point, one which I have written about before, and I hope to join Jon in helping my students with data presentation. Which brings me to ...

2) Meeting tomorrow with Kentucky data officials about getting access to some datasets on leadership preparation. We are being forced to redesign principal preparation here in Kentucky and I have been thinking about ways we can use state data to inform our decisions. In particular, I want to use state data to track our graduates throughout their careers and stay in touch with them.

3) Third, I have been thinking lately about the ubiquitousness of data and that there is so much we can learn across professional borders. For instance, how the Obama campaign uses qualitative data to supplement their quantitative data and how all that is supplemented by actual conversations with voters is very instructive for schools. When we talk about infusing data analysis into our preparation programs, I think too often we think that a student must create a new dataset and analyze it in some new way following set procedures and using greek letters. We fail to realize that we are constantly analyzing data in our everyday lives and that school leaders are constantly collecting data on their school. A teacher evaluation is a qualitative data instrument. Daily attendance is a quantitative data instrument. Heck, even in a conversation in the teacher's lounge everyone there is gathering data about other teachers and students. We don't think about our everyday activities as data, but they are and we should be integrating those types of everyday data into our preparation programs just as much as extra-ordinary data.

4) But, as great as it is, arguments from data can be totally baseless, as I commented on this post at Dangerously Irrelevant. 

5) Yet, good or bad, there is a lot of power in data. In Kentucky and across the U.S. leadership preparation programs have been shut out of many reform conversations because we don't have the data to force our way into the discussion. Some of the people that are leading this reform effort are just guessing (literally) because no one has taken control of the conversation. The authority necessary to take and hold that power over the conversation is inherent in data because in the 21st Century we have put so much stock in science that we will defer to it, even against our better instincts and allow the people that understand the data to lead us. Obama's fans have put so much trust in David Plouffe, for instance, that they have begun doing this.  

Anyway, I have been thinking so much about data lately that I literally made up a chart to track the amount of shaves I get from the gel kind of shaving cream and the foam kind of shaving cream because I think I get much fewer with the gel, even though it seems like I am using less (hopefully I will be thinking a little less about data soon).