Ed Trends Makes Education Data Transparent and Accessible Article

Veteran State Representative Wendy Horman believes trustworthy information is essential to driving good, innovative policy, so the fact that reliable education data can be hard to come by in Idaho used to be a source of endless frustration for her.

That’s why she is grateful for the existence of Idaho Ed Trends, a feature of the Idaho EdNews website that offers an easy to use online tool that allows the public to do deep-dive comparisons of schools and districts.

Idaho EdNews is an independent, nonprofit education news service funded by the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Family Foundation, and has become the go-to source for education news in Idaho.

Ed Trends provides a strong example of how an innovative and expansive approach to providing information to the public can have a major impact on policy. 

“Idaho EdNews in general and Ed Trends specifically have been instrumental in my work,” said Wendy Horman, a Republican who has represented Idaho Falls in the Idaho House of Representatives since 2012.

“I’ve always wanted to know how we are doing and where we can improve,” Horman said. “If we don’t know where we are, how do we know where we need to improve and where we can go?”

Horman believes that Idaho’s leaders owe it to the public to be transparent about how half their tax dollars — the share that goes to public education in Idaho — are being spent. Until Ed Trends came into existence, publicly available education data wasn’t regularly updated by the Idaho State Department of Education.

Jennifer Swindell, Idaho EdNews’ editor, said she and leadership of the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Family Foundation decided to launch Ed Trends to address this lack of user-friendly, up-to-date school data.

“What concerns us is how long it takes for the state to make data available,” Swindell said. “It is frustrating for parents and members of the community not to be able to get data in a timely fashion, and in a format that’s helpful.”

Swindell said she views parents as the primary audience for Ed Trends’ data. “I believe that educators have access to their own data, but they don’t necessarily share it. We provide this tool for parents, so that they can have all the information they need to make informed decisions that are best for their families.”

Idaho EdNews compiles its data from publicly available sources, and puts it in an easily searchable and understandable format that members of the public can readily understand and work with. The online school comparison tool can delve into data related to student achievement, per-pupil spending, student demographics, reading and math scores, and college go-on rates by district and school. This allows families to make more informed decisions when it comes to their children’s education.

Not only is this information useful to the public at large, it can provide important information to decision-makers, Swindell said. It lists, for example, the top 10 and bottom 10 superintendent salaries in Idaho. This helps school boards looking for a new district leader to size up the salary landscape and make a competitive offer.

Karen Echeverria, the recently retired executive director of the Idaho School Boards Association, said Swindell and some of her staff have made a presentation on how to use the Ed Trends tool at the association’s annual meeting for the past several years, and it is always one of the most well-attended sessions of the conference.

“School board members tend to know their district’s data, but they often don’t realize that they can compare their data to other districts,” she said. “They like to go to the EdNews Ed Trends session because they want to learn how to best use the data, and where they can locate data they might not have realized was available.”

Explore more at edtrends.idahoednews.org.