A new breed of data platforms tie together the entire instructional cycle.

Although No Child Left Behind has its many faults, one important outgrowth of the law has been a focus on using student assessment data to drive instruction. This focus has continued under the Obama administration, which has doled out millions of dollars in federal funding to encourage states and school districts to adopt such practices.

Yet while most schools now measure students’ progress more frequently throughout the school year, using this information to target instruction more effectively can still be a challenge. As recently as last year, an Education Department report noted that states and school systems were making significant progress in building educational data systems—but school leaders still were searching for examples of how best to connect student data to instructional practices.

In this Special Report, we’ll look at how a handful of K-12 schools and districts have taken this critical next step of turning data into achievement. The schools we surveyed for this report range from suburban Seattle, Wash., to rural Alabama—but all share some key characteristics that have contributed to their success, such as a recognition that turning data into achievement involves changing the entire school culture and can’t be done without intensive training and support.

Another key to their success has been the use of a new breed of data platforms that tie together the entire instructional cycle.

School leaders have been asking for end-to-end solutions that bring together the tools used for  instruction, assessment, data review, and professional development, with the ultimate goal of putting real-time data into the hands of teachers and administrators so they can make informed instructional decisions.

Schools have always had data, but typically this information has been all over the place, housed in disparate systems that don’t necessarily talk to one another.