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.

Six data analysts with expertise in public education agencies across the country have teamed up to write a new volume for the Education Data Done Right (EDDR) series.

Following the success of the first volume in this series, which covered missing elements critical to success in building data capacity in education agencies, this new volume showcases applied data science strategies and lessons learned in agencies across the country. New chapters explain how to document work to ensure continuity of operations, navigate data governance, and ensure transparency and reproducibility of agencies’ important work; how early warning systems can be useful in agencies’ work; and why self-awareness of how identities shape the work is one of the most important skills data analysts must have.

Written by Dorothyjean Cratty, LaCole Foots, Wendy Geller, Jared Knowles, Justin Meyer, and Ellis Ott, this new volume covers education data science strategies and lessons with a perspective only possible from authors who’ve been in the trenches and gotten the work done. The series is intended for education agency data analysts, 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 series is a guide through those challenges.

This is the final installment of our Education Data Done Right series.

We’re closing this adventure out with a tight focus on the concrete efforts that enable resilience in your teams, robustness in your systems, durability in your practices, and data centrism in your organization. We try to be very pragmatic here, so we’re quite direct in a few places as we “cut to the chase,” so to speak. After all, your time is valuable.

We also take this opportunity to follow through on some common content requests that we hear from our readers–namely, detailing the important public aggregate education data available. We hope this helps our readers, working in agencies and outside of them, learn more about how local data are represented and used in the public realm. Let’s go!