To understand street data and its potential for transformation, we must first understand the ways in which our current beliefs about learning and equity have been formed. We must explore questions of epistemology, or theories of knowledge: How do we know what we know? Why do we value what we value? What constitutes knowledge, and where does the implicit hierarchy of knowledge come from? Let’s demystify the ingrained ideas about data that have become normalized in education and orient ourselves to a different conception of knowledge. In Decolonizing Methodologies, Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith sheds light on the Western theory of knowledge known as empiricism—which emphasizes the role of sensory evidence and patterns in the formation of ideas rather than innate ideas or traditions—and its relative, the scientific paradigm of positivism. In Western epistemology, “Understanding is viewed as being akin to measuring. As the ways we try to understand the world are reduced to issues of measurement, the ways we try to understand the world are reduced to issues of measurement, the focus of understanding becomes more concerned with procedural problems … and of developing operational definitions of phenomena which are reliable and valid” (Smith, 2012, p. 44). Western approaches to knowledge building via research and data collection (often called, in Indigenous critiques, “white research” or “outsider research”‘) emerge from a larger idea of “the West,” which scholar Stuart Hall breaks down into four components: Allowing researchers to characterize and classify societies into categories (think “subgroups” in our current data system) Condensing complex images of other societies through a system of representation (think “dashboards”) Providing a standard model of comparison (think “valid and reliable assessments” that allow us to compare the performance of “subgroups” from year to year) Providing criteria of evaluation against which other societies can be ranked (think “standards”) (Hall, 1992, pp. 276320) Africana Studies scholar Serie McDougal III discusses the science of knowing, cautioning against scientific colonialism, “which occurs when the center of gravity for the acquisition of knowledge about a people is located outside of that people’s lived reality” (McDougal III, 2014, p. 15). He cites Wade Nobles’s explanation that scientific colonialism leaves many researchers conceptually incarcerated (a stark image) by using non-African concepts, ideas, and perspectives to study people of African descent. This leads to a host of interpretive problems, including ahistorical analysis, deficit thinking, and failure to give adequate weight to the cultural perspective of the people being studied—the essence of our modern educational data system. Does this start to look and feel familiar? Can you trace the shadows of the Western hierarchical society from our opening story? Since the birth of standardized testing in the mid-1900s, the field of education has validated an empirical distance when it comes to data. We value knowledge and by extension, data that can be verified by measurement and that is viewed as neutral and “scientific.” By the same token, we reject the legitimacy of spiritual, social, and story-centered forms of knowledge.2 The language of this Western data system has become so naturalized in our discourse that many of us no longer question its legitimacy. Of course, we’re talking about the “achievement gap,” “grades,” and “subgroups”! It’s the air we breathe. 2 My colleague Denise Augustine, a secondee for Indigenous Education with the Ministry of Education in British Columbia, challenges educators to stop using the qualifier “just” before talking about stories and other forms of qualitative data. She names that these are central data points in Indigenous and other non-Western cultures, with profound, unmitigated value. What if, because of what we’ve deemed valid and reliable, we have been asking the wrong set of questions? What if the achievement gap itself is a mythology? In reality, we rely on test scores and other quantitative metrics that are deeply entwined with our histories of racism, exclusion, and even eugenics—the movement for controlled selective breeding of human populations born in late nineteenth century England and made famous through Hitler’s genocidal master-race theory. While this history may seem a far cry from today’s high-stakes tests, we can find echoes of pseudo-scientific beliefs in genetic difference throughout American educational history that have been used to justify exclusion and inequity. In 1779, Thomas Jefferson proposed a two-track educational system, with different tracks for “the laboring and the learned.” Scholarship would allow a very few of the laboring class to advance, Jefferson said, by “raking a few geniuses from the rubbish.” By the 1830s, most southern states had laws forbidding teaching enslaved African Americans to read. Still, around 5 percent became literate at great personal peril. By 1870, the state of California had devised a formula of ten: When African Americans, Asian Americans, or Native Americans numbered ten students, a school district was empowered to create separate schools for whites and non-white children. (Note the emphasis on classification and separation, a precursor to “subgroups.”) (Applied Research Center (ARC) Timeline, 2011) Fast forward to 1932 when a survey of 150 school districts revealed that 75 percent were using so-called intelligence testing to place students in different academic tracks. By 1948, we see the Educational Testing Service merge with the College Entrance Examination Board, the Cooperative Test Service, the National Committee on Teachers Examinations, and other entities to continue the work of eugenicists like Carl Brigham (originator of the SAT), who did research to “prove” that immigrants were feeble minded. The list goes on and on. Race Forward (previously the Applied Research Center) has a historical timeline of public education available on their website (https://www.raceforward.org/research/reports/historical-timeline-public-education-us). As we reckon with these histories, we must interrogate our assumptions about knowledge, measurement, and what really matters when it comes to educating young people. What if there were a completely different way to think about all of this? What would a more expansive and culturally sustaining epistemology yield?