Doug McCurry

There are two ways to react to the stark statistics about the achievement gap: despair and excuses, or hope and action. Unfortunately, until recently, many have chosen the former. In fact, most of the educational community relied on the most famous piece of educational research in history, James Coleman's famous 1966 report, to let themselves off the hook. Coleman found a correlation between socioeconomic status and student achievement: poor, minority kids did worse than affluent, white kids. The dominant educational paradig...

In his book "Better," surgeon Atul Gawande writes about one small field in medicine that is light-years ahead of others in focusing on using data to improve performance: cystic fibrosis care. CF is a serious disease that attacks the body mainly by thickening secretions that block airways and erode lung function. CF is so pernicious that in 1957, the disease had a 20% annual mortality rate, and the average CF patient died by the age of three. At that time, there was one (thought to be crazy) doctor, Leroy Matthews, claiming ...