Take a break from the Olympics for a moment and look at something else worth watching: London recently released its testing scores, showing vast improvements over the rest of England’s regions thanks to the Improving Schools Programme’s London Challenge. Due to data-driven accountability strategies, London students improved their ranking from fourth in 2004 to number one in 2011 in several testing categories, with even higher improvements seen when controlling for the high volume of child poverty in the region.
The London Challenge, among other things, focuses on building the capacity of schools to track and understand data, citing that “using data to evaluate the effectiveness of school provision and particular programmes of intervention has become embedded in these improving schools.”
Data, data, data. Always a key component to continued improvement.
Keep up the good work, London, and let’s see what lessons U.S. schools can learn from their success.