Wendy Geller, Dorothyjean Cratty, and Jared Knowles – three data analysts with expertise in public education agencies – have teamed up to write a new book which covers the missing elements that are critical to success in building data capacity in education agencies. The book is intended for education agency data analysts, teams of analyst, and data managers, strategists, and leaders seeking to improve how their agency operates.
Many education agency data analysts come from a social science research background and the transition to work inside agencies can come with a lot of new challenges. This book is a guide through those challenges covering topics such as metadata, data requests, how to work with IT, politics, and descriptive data analysis.
The book covers these topics with wit and humor and a perspective only possible from authors who’ve been in the trenches and gotten the work done. Each chapter was reviewed by another expert in the field who gave valuable outside perspective and broadened the horizon of the book to ensure its relevance for agencies across the country.
Get the book now on LeanPub and on Amazon
The book is accompanied by a website where analysts across the country can get in touch and suggest contributions for planned future volumes. On the website you can also learn more about the biographies of the authors and each of the contributors. Visit the book homepage to find out how you can contribute!
About the Authors
Dr. Wendy Geller is currently the Director of the Data Management & Analysis Division. There, she leads a team that serves as a centralized resource to the Vermont Agency of Education. Her crew collects, stewards, and leverages the institution’s critical data assets to create and share data products that enable empirically-based practice and policy decision-making.
Dr. Jared Knowles is formerly a research analyst at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (2011-2016) and is currently the president of Civilytics Consulting LLC, which provides training, analytic services, and strategy to education agencies across the country.
Ms. Dorothyjean Cratty is formerly a research associate at the U.S. Department of Education. She is currently the founder of DJC Applied Research, which provides high-quality in-depth data analysis of administrative education data.
From the Homepage
Across the country hundreds of data scientists and analysts are working for thousands of education agencies trying to help schools, school leaders, and education systems as a whole function more effectively. The work they do is critical to everything from scheduling classes and evaluating programs, to managing enrollments, strategic planning, and making the laws that shape our public education infrastructure at large.
This book is for them. For their work. For the struggle.
Lots of pundits and researchers have ideas about how education data work should be done and who should do it. Many of their ideas are disseminated widely. But, there are far fewer places for education analysts themselves to share their ideas, to describe their challenges, or to cover their efforts to do good science in the everyday.
We wanted to bring the voices and the work these folks do to the forefront, so others among them could learn from the hard fought advances they’ve made and that benefit us all. This book is by folks who’ve been agency analysts for folks who are agency analysts.
And we hope it is just the beginning.