From Data to Action: A Community Approach to Improving Youth Outcomes (Harvard Education Letter Impact Series)

This book is a welcome guide for educators, civic leaders, and researchers looking for ways to leverage data to identify the most effective policies, interventions, and use of resources for their communities.

In the current era of reform, much has been made of the fact that there are many influences that shape children beyond the walls of the schoolhouse. Powerful data “warehouses” have been built to track children and interventions within school bureaucracies and in other social service sectors. Yet these data systems are rarely linked to provide a holistic view of how individual children are faring both in and out of school and which interventions—or combinations thereof—are most promising. Privacy laws and institutional traditions have made such collaborations difficult, if not impossible. Until now.

The Youth Data Archive, based at the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities at Stanford University, is an effort to blaze a new path to the productive use of cross-agency data now employed by researchers, school officials, and service providers in San Francisco, San Mateo, Alameda, and Santa Clara counties.

Editors Milbrey McLaughlin and Rebecca A. London, leaders of the Youth Data Archive, bring together participants who describe the initiative and its challenges and successes. The participants also give detailed background on how the archive was built and how it has led to improvements in services, particularly for children at risk. This book is a welcome guide for educators, civic leaders, and researchers looking for ways to leverage data to identify the most effective policies, interventions, and use of resources for their communities.

Milbrey McLaughlin, EdD, is the David Jacks Professor of Education and Public Policy, Emerita, at Stanford University and the founding director of the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Communities. She also is codirector of the Center for Research on the Context of Teaching, an interdisciplinary research center engaged in analyses of how teaching and learning are shaped by teachers’ organizational, institutional, and social-cultural contexts. McLaughlin has focused throughout her career on the various institutional contexts and policies that shape youth outcomes—schools and community-based institutions most particularly. The JGC embodies McLaughlin’s interest in identifying and understanding the cross institutional issues that shape the settings within and through which youth move, and in advancing a “youth sector” stance to inform policy and practice. She is the author or coauthor of many books, articles, and chapters on education policy issues, contexts for teaching and learning, productive environments for youth, and community-based organizations. Her recent books include: Between Movement and Establishment: Organizations Advocating for Youth, Stanford University Press, 2009; Building School-based Teacher Learning Communities, Teachers College Press, 2006; School Districts and Instructional Renewal, Teachers College Press, 2002; and Communities of Practice and the Work of High School Teaching, University of Chicago Press, 2001. Dr. McLaughlin holds an EdM and EdD in education policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a BA in philosophy from Connecticut College.

Rebecca A. London, PhD, is Senior Researcher at the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Communities and the researcher overseeing all analyses conducted with the Youth Data Archive. She has been with the Center since 2005. Throughout her career, London’s research has bridged academia and policy, focusing on the policies and programs intended to serve low-income or disadvantaged families and youth. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, London has conducted research on a variety of policy-relevant topics such as physical fitness and academic achievement, secondary to postsecondary transitions, the effects of afterschool program participation, the digital divide for youth, the effects of welfare reform, college attendance among low-income mothers, and children’s living arrangements. Her work has been published in journals such as the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Social Science Quarterly, the Journal of Higher Education, Journal of School Health, Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk, and Youth & Society. She has also written many reports and briefs aimed at a nonacademic policy and practitioner audience. Dr. London holds a PhD in human development and social policy from Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy, an MA in economics, also from Northwestern, and a BA in economics from the University of Michigan.