From Cholera to School Improvement: How data can save lives and make them better
This article is taken from the Australian Learning Lecture, Joy and Data, that I delivered on 21st May 2015. Watch the full lecture and download the transcript.
I’ve always been a lover of data — of graphs and charts, and everything that data can tell me. My view is that data, alongside analysis, and informed ethical judgement can — and does — improve lives. Now, more than ever, we need to recruit it as an ally in improving the human condition.
We need only go back to 1884 to find the first systematic use of data to solve a major health problem. By mapping the incidences of cholera during an outbreak in London, a physician named John Snow was able to show that the source was a water pump in Broad Street (now known as Broadwick Street). Until that crucial discovery, people, including John Snow, had believed that cholera was transmitted through miasma or “bad air”.
He convinced the local authority to remove the handle from the pump after which the cholera epidemic abated. You can visit the pub named after the great John Snow in that very street and raise a glass to data and the lives it, and John Snow, saved.
Of course, today data is more persuasive, easier to capture, and more powerfully analysed than ever before. It’s easy to see this spread of data into every corner of our lives as a threat but it is also possible to see it as part of a new democratisation; data is everywhere and belongs to everybody, not just the experts.
This is an exciting thought, one that holds great possibilities for the future, but it is threatened by four widely held misconceptions:
It’s true that data may not seem creative or inspirational but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t essential to many creative and inspirational acts. For a performer, athlete or artist — to name just a few examples — the daily grind of practice based on data and feedback only serves to hone their craft.
Playing the Beethoven Violin Concerto is creative, and probably inspirational too, but it doesn’t happen without a lot of hard work behind the scenes. The listener may appreciate the creativity and the inspiration without the hard work — but the hard work is still essential to the performance.
The disciplined regime, based on data and feedback, which makes artistic and sporting performances possible, applies to inspirational leaders too. Shakespeare’s Henry V is one example, albeit in his literary form in this instance. On the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, Shakespeare provides Henry V with the magnificent St Crispin’s Day speech.
Of course, the speech is incredibly moving; but we shouldn’t be fooled into thinking that this (or whatever the real Henry actually said) won the battle.
The speech might have contributed, but it would have been like chaff in the wind without careful preparation. Someone had to count the bows, fill the quivers with arrows, and ensure they were given to the archers who decided the battle. Detailed planning (based on data), in addition to the inspirational words passionately spoken beforehand, was responsible for the victory.
Some people argue that data is somehow in conflict with human judgement and is replacing it.
On 12 May 1997 a computer called Deep Blue beat the then World Champion, Garry Kasparov, at chess. At the time it seemed to me that part of what it meant to be human was taken away from us. In retrospect, I’m not so sure.
Garry Kasparov later described playing a game of chess against the Bulgarian Veselin Topalov, where both were able to use machines throughout. He describes how having the machine do the tactical calculations allowed him to focus on the strategy and the creative acts that brute processing power can’t manage. This combination of data and human ingenuity now enables chess players to win in more creative and inventive ways than ever before. I find this a heart-warming affirmation of humanity.
Data can inform, humans have to exercise judgement. This point applies at the micro-level and the macro-level, the classroom as well as the school, the operating theatre as well as the hospital. The evidence provides insights into what is likely to work — but it doesn’t tell you what is the morally right thing to do.
For example, when I worked for the British Government in Downing Street, my colleagues and I discovered that 5,000 people a year died in hospital from infections they acquired after they had been admitted. We were appalled.
When I raised it with the country’s top health official he commented, “It’s always been like that; hospitals are dangerous places.” I found the complacency as frightening as the facts, and said the state of affairs was morally unacceptable. Deep expertise was being used to justify the data rather than change it.
We took on the issue of hospital-acquired infections and within two years the National Health Service had reduced the number of deaths to 3,500 — still unacceptable but undoubtedly progress.
As data becomes more ubiquitous, it is not unreasonable to expect professions to take it into account. When we hear professions rejecting and questioning data and trying to defend the secrecy of their practice we are right to be suspicious. In my days in government, I often found myself in this unproductive loop so I developed the idea of “informed professional judgement”.
I usually explain this concept via my own experiences in the classroom. In the late 1970s when I started teaching just north of London, you simply qualified and started teaching. Someone shoved you through a classroom door on your first day and then you were on your own. Hardly anyone came to see you teach and any advice you got was the odd tip from an experienced teacher over coffee in the staffroom.
This is what I call “uninformed professionalism” — there were great teachers, but there was no systematic attempt to build a body of proven practice and share it across the profession.
By the early 1980s governments began to attempt to reform this palpably inadequate state of affairs. The problem was that, at the time, governments didn’t know what good government-led reform looked like. Some years later, in Tony Blair’s administration, we used central power to shift outcomes. We made mistakes, but we also made a positive difference to student achievement. This was the era of “informed prescription”. We had worked out the basic characteristics of successful whole system reform.
But this could only take the process of reform so far. Governments can mandate adequacy but they cannot mandate greatness; greatness has to be unleashed. This final phase that allows for the unleashing of greatness I call “informed professionalism”. Government’s role is to create the circumstances in which success is possible while teachers and school leaders lead the way to greatness.
And part of the context has to be good, close-to-real time data at classroom, school and system level. Only in this way can we put the “informed” in informed professionalism.
We are drowning in, what my colleagues John Behrens and Kristen DiCerbo call, “the digital ocean”. Every electronic transaction, every click, every mobile telephone call, every email and every text can be recorded, stored and analyzed.
This provides an extraordinary capacity for society and individuals to learn. For example, the data the computer gathers as I cycle can be shared, not just with my coach, but also through websites such as Strava. As a result, I can benchmark my rides on a particular stretch of road against countless other riders, whom I have never meet.
I can compete and learn simultaneously. I can take control of my own learning and become an informed learner.
Of course such data ubiquity and its collection carries risks and threats to privacy. I don’t think there’s a neat resolution to the moral dilemma here. The solution is certainly not to avoid collecting and learning from data. That would be to miss the opportunity to put the science in the science of learning. It would also be to misunderstand the issue — which is not the data itself, but the use to which it is put.
Instead, I think we need to collectively take responsibility for the ethics that surround the explosion of data, with regulatory frameworks in place that maximize the benefits and minimize the risks. If you ask most people most of the time they advocate both transparency and privacy, two important ideas, which are at the same time necessary and in tension. We’re going to need to arrive at some sensible, ethically sound rules that manage this tension if we’re going to be able to make the most positive impact with data.
So, whether you’re identifying a Cholera-spreading water-pump in Victorian London, becoming a better cyclist, waging war with the French in the 1400s, or teaching a class of 30, data is a powerful ally.
That’s not a new thing — what is new is that with smarter technologies and an ocean of digital data we are on the brink of having an even more powerful ally. It’s my view that the future will be owned by the school or health system, the companies and the individuals, who harness the possibilities — not to replace human capabilities, but to unleash what is best in us.
The Australian Learning Lecture is an initiative of the Koshland Innovation Fund and State Library Victoria
Read my follow-up post on data and the transformation of education here
