This is a trend that's been around for some time. When I taught high school in Baltimore City Public Schools in 2008, my experience with data-driven education was decidedly negative. The mantra was basically the more data the better, and we collected data for its own sake. Not a whole lot of thought went into the validity of the data or its analysis. It added a tremendous amount of overhead and already insanely stressful job.
That's not to say that data couldn't be really useful. It would be great to basically get rid of age-based grade system and the track system (honors, regular, remedial) and simply let children move along in each subject as they demonstrate progress.
But, unfortunately, we're stuck educational policy culture constantly on the search for silver-bullet solutions. "Data" is just the latest iteration of a great idea, perverted by a need to shoehorn it into a system that refuses to truly adapt.
Having done much with districts in the past, I observed the same push to collect data and then make use of it in the classroom and at the district level. In the districts I encountered, there was plenty of data collection and there were even some basic reports each system might provide, but beyond that, very little thought went into `what to do with this data to turn it into actionable knowledge`. Districts would blindly throw hundreds of thousands of dollars at the problem of data collection with very little, and often none, at the actual analysis portion of the problem.
Districts often face even more fundamental problems, such as each software system being a silo to it's own data and being very hard to cross reference with other systems. SISes, LMSes, HR, and dozens of smaller systems existing in their own world. Many questions one might want to pose needs data from two or three of these. So, questions like `is Steve a much more pronounced risk of dropping out of high school` are hard/impossible to ask (depends on the software systems and data collection practices).
But there's only so much you can do with crap data. In my experience, you often have have consultants/experts who are divorced from the reality of classroom teaching or teachers who are too embroiled in the day-to-day to execute data-driven instruction effectively.
"“She sees where her scores fall on all these charts compared to all these other kids, and then she feels like she is behind or ahead or right in the middle, so she feels like she’s just average rather than excellent at what she does,” she said."
to me that feels like everything that is wrong with education right now. Talking to friends that are educators. parents seem to want to be blissfully ignorant of anything that says their child isn't a genius. Parents seem to think that passing the mandated standardized test is a sign that their child is ahead rather than what it really means that they might just barely have met the min bar.
You could also get children to legitimately put a lot of effort into answering something like "rank your top 10 friends in order" - you could map how networks evolve over time, probably all the way through middle school for some.
That's not to say that data couldn't be really useful. It would be great to basically get rid of age-based grade system and the track system (honors, regular, remedial) and simply let children move along in each subject as they demonstrate progress.
But, unfortunately, we're stuck educational policy culture constantly on the search for silver-bullet solutions. "Data" is just the latest iteration of a great idea, perverted by a need to shoehorn it into a system that refuses to truly adapt.