How Accessible, Actionable Data Can Aid Academic Recovery Efforts

In Rhode Island, a state dashboard now tracks school attendance in real time, updating the percentage of chronically absent students in each public school every night. And, amid a statewide push to rein in post-COVID absenteeism, families whose children are racking up absences might just get a phone call from the state’s governor. 

The Rhode Island effort is a model for what some experts consider a necessary shift in how states, districts and schools collect and use data to propel ongoing academic and social-emotional recovery post pandemic. Education leaders, teachers and families need up-to-the-moment, meaningful data they can use to nimbly guide instruction and get help to the students who need it the most, experts said at a panel the Education Writers Association hosted during the 2025 SXSW EDU conference in Austin, Texas, in March. 

Moderated by Elizabeth Miller, a reporter at Oregon Public Broadcasting, the panel featured: 

• Rachel Anderson, vice president for policy analysis and impact at the nonprofit Data Quality Campaign
• Robert Balfanz, a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Education and director of the Everyone Graduates Center
• Angélica Infante-Green, the Rhode Island commissioner of elementary and secondary education

High-quality data is a cornerstone of Balfanz’s work with the GRAD Partnership, a group of researchers, school districts and community organizations that collaborated to design new student support systems post-pandemic. As a key part of these systems, school-based student success teams consisting of principals, teachers, counselors and other staff meet regularly and use real-time data to address post-COVID challenges, such as high chronic absenteeism. 

That data should go beyond more traditional metrics schools have tracked, such as test scores, Balfanz said. It should capture how well schools are doing on what he called “the new ABCs” of supporting students: A stands for (student) agency, B for belonging and C for connectedness. 

The panelists acknowledged that the hunger for more and smarter data is colliding with the disappearance of some federal education data under the Trump administration. But they argued that states and school districts must forge ahead despite the setbacks, stepping up their data game to spur action.  

“Data for the sake of data doesn’t mean anything,” Infante-Green said.  

For reporters covering this topic, here are some takeaways from EWA’s session, “Utilizing Data to Drive Real Results in Academic Recovery.” 

Why Data on Student Outcomes Often Isn’t Put to Use?

State and school district data systems are often built to comply with reporting mandates rather than to offer useful tools that educators, students and parents can use, Anderson said. 

As a result, these entities are often sitting on vast repositories of data, without clear ways of analyzing it and putting it to work. That has sometimes left educators with blind spots — and hampered the ability of students and families to take ownership of their learning. 

Anderson said the Data Quality Campaign recently asked high school students in Kentucky what information they got about their school experience and progress, and it found teens felt they didn’t know how they were doing academically and how prepared they were for life after high school. 

“Data should be a tool that informs students and those who work with them,” Anderson said. “But this is not the picture of what’s happening in most places.” 

Then came the pandemic, leaving heightened, complex student academic and mental health needs in its wake. That added urgency to efforts to better use education data. 

Why Schools Need Data That More Fully Reflects the Student Experience

Take the push to address high chronic absenteeism, Balfanz said. 

For a recent report on the state of pandemic recovery nationally, Balfanz and colleagues with The GRAD Partnership identified 5,000 high schools across the country where 400 or more students were chronically absent in 2020-21. In the past, schools have often steered extra help to students based on teacher or staff referrals, which can work well. But with so many students needing significant attendance and academic support, schools must lean more heavily on data to triage their interventions and discover patterns allowing them to serve large numbers of students.

Schools also need to capture the student experience more fully through data that goes well beyond test scores and attendance rates. They can meaningfully track whether students have supportive relationships with adults at school, according to Balfanz. Student involvement and attendance in extracurricular activities also offers a window in their connectedness to their school communities. 

“If you feel agency, belonging and connection, you will push through some minor barriers,” Balfanz said about “the new ABCs.”  

Why Education Data Needs to Be More Accessible to the Public

A key reason to rethink how education agencies track and share data is to make it much more accessible to students, families and the public. That’s because in this post-pandemic moment, schools need all the allies they can get to help young people bounce back academically and socially. 

Infante-Green of Rhode Island said clear, accessible data has been crucial to the state’s push to combat high student absenteeism. It’s an issue that schools alone cannot solve, she said. In addition to steering the public to the state attendance dashboard — which Rhode Island launched before COVID but fine-tuned during the pandemic — the state also put out graphics showing major gaps in achievement and other outcomes between chronically absent students and their peers with consistent attendance.  

“I don’t think anyone understood how big of a problem it was until we connected it to outcomes,” Infante-Green said. “Once we started showing the performance data, people were horrified.”

Armed with that data, state officials have gone all out to enlist outside help. They made a case to pediatricians that they should bring up absenteeism during preventative check-ins. They asked clergy to talk about the issue from the pulpit. They pleaded with employers not to hire students to work during school hours. 

“It’s really an all-hands approach,” Infante-Green said. “No one is allowed to complain or say anything unless they are going to do something.”

Infante-Green said the effort is paying off. The state has seen a 10 percentage point drop in chronic absenteeism overall since the 2021-22 school year. It also notched gains in math and held its ground in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress as most other states saw declines. 

Will States and Researchers Band Together Amid Education Data Setbacks? 

Experts noted that rising budget pressures and a federal move to curtail access to some education data are complicating the push to make data a more useful tool. But they agreed that this push can and must continue. 

Infante-Green said Rhode Island largely built its data system and dashboard in-house. She believes the state is well set up to continue the work even as some federal grants it used expire. Anderson said states are investing more of their own funds into systems that offer real-time data. 

“They recognize that we actually need this real-time information to underscore everything we are trying to do,” she said. 

Experts said the disappearance of federal data and reduced backing for education research is a major setback. However, experts noted, it is ultimately states that provide education data to the federal government, and states and researchers could band together to fill a void at the federal level. Anderson said she is “cautiously optimistic.” 

But the ability to compare outcomes across states is key. 

Balfanz pointed to the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act, which standardized how states measured graduation: That shift cracked down on practices in some states that allowed them to obscure dropout rates and overstate their graduation gains. 

“We really can’t overstate the impact of taking away federal data and research supports,” Anderson said. “It allows for a level of comparability across states, which all have different measures and systems.”