08/23/2026
A teacher was logging how many seconds a student could hold a pencil each day. She didn't call it "data," but she was tracking a kid's progress. That’s exactly what data is, and it drew Gustavo Luna, Ed.M.'22, Ed.L.D.'25, to the Data Wise framework at HGSE.
Twenty years ago, Data Wise started as a response to a very specific problem: schools were drowning in assessment data from No Child Left Behind and had no idea what to do with it. That challenge led Professor Richard Murnane to convene educators from Boston Public Schools with HGSE researchers. Over two years, they built something practical: the now-iconic "swoosh," an eight-step process for turning evidence into action.
What's striking two decades later is how the framework evolved. More than 5,000 educators have gone through the Data Wise Leadership Institute. Certified coaches, including Luna, now work in districts from Oregon to Florida and internationally in Australia, Chile, and Brazil. And the framework itself has grown more honest: coaches like Darnisa Amante-Jackson, Ed.L.D.'16, pushed the team to stop treating equity as a separate add-on lesson and instead build it into every single step, resulting in what's now called the "equity halo": reflective prompts like "Whose stories do we tell, and whose do we not?"
As Kathy Boudett, Data Wise's executive director, puts it: "Deciding to use Data Wise doesn't make the work easy. Working collaboratively to look at evidence of learning is hard, and looking honestly at your own practice is even harder." But that's the point: the framework doesn't promise easy; it gives educators a shared way to talk about what's not working and a reason to keep going.
The next chapter is about reach: a free, asynchronous intro module called Exploring Data Wise launches later this year, inviting educators anywhere in the world to try the framework at no cost—and to start using it in their own work.
Read the full story to learn how a two-year working group became one of HGSE's longest-running and most-replicated frameworks—and how it can inform your work today: https://bit.ly/4hBqUNa
