Professor Van Ry

The increasingly ubiquitous flow of data across education has caused anxiety among parents and privacy advocates, who fear that information about students will be released or shared with outside entities without permission. Yet a new report, while acknowledging those concerns, focuses on a potential payoff in expanding the openness of data across K-12: robust economic growth.

That analysis, released by the global consulting business McKinsey & Co., concludes that creating more open and transparent data in education from both public and private sources could “unlock” between $900 billion and $1.2 trillion in annual economic value worldwide, about a third of it in the United States.

The report says that added economic value in education would be derived from the higher future earnings of students, resulting from the use of technology and data to tailor academic approaches to individual students’ needs, as well as through financial savings for school districts realized through improved procurement processes and other means. <Read more.>

Via Sean Cavanagh and Michele Molnar, Education Week.