Overview

Two worlds exist side by side, and neither knows the other is there. If you work outside education-in business, healthcare, technology, research-you assume anyone in a professional setting can open a file, sort a column, and answer basic questions about who they're serving. You would never imagine that an entire sector serving fifty million children operates without these capabilities. If you work inside education, you may have no idea that the information you need actually exists, that it can be extracted in minutes, that a single spreadsheet could replace the stacks of paper you've been sorting by hand for decades. Janet Johnson has spent thirty years straddling both worlds. As an evaluator of federally funded education programs, she watched educators identify students for algebra intervention based on minority-sounding last names. She watched a district deliver test scores in binders that principals used as doorstops. She watched staff spend months hand-reviewing paper transcripts, unaware the data existed electronically. And she watched people fight to keep it that way. Not everyone wants educators to see their own data. Controlling who gets access to rigorous coursework and quality instruction is real power-and some people have held that power for decades. There's also money in the gap: an entire industry profits from providing services to demographic groups rather than to students whose data shows they actually need help. When EDSTAR began showing educators what their data revealed, the response from some quarters wasn't gratitude. It was a campaign to shut them down. Working in the Dark is an attempt to open both worlds to each other. For those outside education: this is how schools actually operate, and why. For those inside: this is what's possible, and it's not magic. For everyone: this is what some people don't want you to know. The gap is real. But so is the path across it.

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