Value Lessons.

Denise Davies, a deputy head teacher at the school, is worried about a handful of teenagers who performed relatively well on national-curriculum tests at age 14. But, as the graph starkly illustrates, they have since slipped behind the average progress of their peers nationally who started out with similar performances. As the former physical education teacher rattles off the myriad ways in which the school mines information about test-score gains to critique and improve its practice, it's hard not to be impressed. The senior management uses such data to evaluate the whole school. The heads of subject departments meet annually with the school's board of governors to discuss their results and explain what they're doing to improve or maintain their standards. They also use the data within their departments to identify individual teachers or courses that are doing exceptionally well or might need shoring up. And across the school, such information is used to support, exhort, and push students to do better. In the United States, interest is mounting in tracking the academic progress of individual students over time to determine how much value schools add to their learning.