The Socially Constructed Dashboard: How Educators Shape and Are Shaped by Publicly Available Data

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 7
  In Roundtable Session: Using Data in Decision Making: Policy and Practice

Abstract

Quantitative metrics are increasingly employed as a means of holding institutions, including education, accountable. For instance, the California School Dashboard is a webpage that displays metrics for each public school and district in the state color-coded into five performance levels. In this paper, I build upon sociological theories to show how what we choose to measure, how we measure it, and how we display these data can alter on-the-ground processes within organizations. Specifically, I describe how school accountability measures like the Dashboard shape organizational and individual actions and the implications of these decisions for students.

Author

• Rebecca Gleit, Stanford University