A Louisiana district scours a year's worth of discipline reports for patterns. It occurred to Bowman that analyzing the reports could provide insight into the root causes of disciplinary problems--tardiness, dress code violations, fighting, vandalism, and more--as well as the effectiveness of how the schools deal with them, and how fairly discipline is enforced. The reports generally contain structured data, including demographic information such as the student's grade and age, and a written narrative that describes the infraction.
All schools have data about student achievement. To make the most of these data to improve learning, we need to take be aware of many other factors - evidence that describes our students' wider learning environment.