A reason defenders of traditional public education oppose standardized testing and other data collection is that the information (in their view) yields little usable information, either for helping students or schools. But in this clip from Monday’s Alliance for Excellent Education confab, Ruth Curran Neild, who, along with her fellow Johns Hopkins researcher (and Promoting Power Index creator) Robert Balfanz, offers more reasons why data can be so useful. Dropout factories are not only alike in so many ways, but the underlying causes are so easy to measure.