Commentary: Data system will chart path to success
Special to CalMatters
Positivity rates. ICU capacity. Unemployment claims. Vaccine efficacy. Inflation. Over the past year, California’s public officials and individual citizens alike have navigated the pandemic by relying on data.
It’s helped us understand a terrifying new reality. It’s helped us recognize that
Black and brown Californians are least likely to have access to work-from-home options, in-person learning and vaccinations; that we are more likely to become infected, lose our jobs or lose our lives. And now, data is helping us chart a pathway out.
At least when it comes to our public health and economic crises. Our educational crisis is a different story.
Update: The final report will be sent to Gov. Newsom on Dec. 18.
One of the few notable areas where Gov. Gavin Newsom departed from his predecessor Gov. Jerry Brown on entering office was his support for establishing a longitudinal data system linking information from preschool into the workplace.
Despite the fact that most other states had created that system in some form, for years Brown resisted entreaties from researchers and advocates to allocate the funds to set one up.
But it was such a high priority for Newsom that, within days of taking office in 2019, he called for it in the second paragraph of his first budget as governor. He designated an initial $10 million for “critical work” to create what he called “the California Cradle-to-Career Data System” in order to “to better track student outcomes and increase the alignment of our educational system to the state’s workforce needs.”