Education Reform, By the Numbers

“I make numbers talk,” Richard Bowman likes to say when describing his new profession.

But he isn’t in finance or economics, he’s in education policy, and he hopes to use his analytic expertise to help reform the country’s public school systems with the help of a program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education (HGSE).

Since 2008, the Strategic Data Project (SDP), under Harvard’s Center for Policy Education Research, has placed fellows like Bowman in state education agencies, school districts, and charter school management organizations where they are helping policymakers to decode an avalanche of educational data. Their mission is to transform the use of data in education to improve student achievement.

“We are creating a new profession in education called analytic leaders,” said SDP Executive Director Sarah Glover. “These are people who are facile with data, strong analytically, and who know how to think about problem solving.”

To read more about the Strategic Data Project, please visit the Harvard Gazette.