Key National Education Indicators Workshop Summary (2012) / Chapter Skim
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1 Introduction
1 Introduction
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The system is intended to "deepen our factual knowledge and understanding of the country's most pressing issues" pertaining to the economy, the environment, and people (including families, health, education, civic engagement, and culture) .1 As part of that effort, the NAS held a workshop in January 2012, to explore possibilities for a set of key indicators that will help policy makers and the public assess the state of education in the country.2 The broad goals for the national indicator system include providing a means for the nation to use a "shared set of facts" in determining "where we've been, where, we are, and whether we are leaving the country a better place for future generations."3 The key task in developing education indicators will be to identify a clear and parsimonious set of measures and data that will be easy for nonspecialists to understand but which will also do justice to the complexities of the disparate U.S.
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; Indicator Systems for Monitoring Mathematics and Science Education (Shavelson, McDonnell, Oakes, Carey and Pikus, 1987) ; The Kids Count data book reports produced annually by the Annie E
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This report describes the workshop presentations and discussions and is intended as the first step in the development of a portfolio of key national indicators of progress in education.
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In the field of education, school districts typically collect average scores on a standardized reading assessment for each grade to monitor how well students are meeting basic benchmarks as they progress in reading. Other commonly used education indicators include high school graduation rates, rates of truancy, ratios of teachers to students, and per-pupil expenditures, as well as measures of less quantifiable factors, such as teachers' and students' attitudes.
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The National Education Association produced state comparisons for indicators related to the teaching profession, and the United States Department of Education's Center for Education Statistics published a variety of statistics (Ginsburg, Noell, and Plisko, 1988)
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The Condition of Education report documents various sorts of data to provide detailed information in five areas: participation in education, learner outcomes, student effort and educational progress, and contexts of elementary and secondary education as well as higher education4 Editorial Projects in Education, the publisher of Education Week and the Education Counts reports, has also published indicators in many areas, as have other organizations. International organizations have also focused on indicators.
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While acknowledging that other frameworks could serve a similar purpose, it developed a rough framework based on those two goals: see Table 1-1. The framework covers the stages of life by identifying five broad sectors of education: preschool, K-12 education, higher education, other postsecondary education and training, and lifelong or informal learning (learning that occurs outside the formal structures of the education system)
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A rule of thumb suggested by David Breneman, the steering committee chair, was that a good system might begin with approximately one-third indicators based on existing data sources with long-term trend lines, one-third indicators that are not routinely collected but conceivably could be collected, and onethird indicators in a more gray area -- those that reflect areas of key importance but present measurement challenges and require further development. As he noted at the beginning of the workshop, "We have some freedom to think in a fairly open way about what we would like to see." Identifying a short list of indicators that "people should attend to and making them readily available on a website would be a great contribution to education in this country," he added.
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As Chris Hoenig, senior advisor to the NAS presidents, noted in opening remarks, the overall set of indicators ultimately adopted by SUSA will be vitally important because they will be used to guide goals and decisions about each major sector in the country. He showed the group the preliminary version of the interactive website, which displays the health indicators that have been selected, to illustrate how useful the program can be.
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