Chalkbeat Colorado: A study that seeks to understand the effects of Denver’s education reform policies is moving forward — but not without significant pushback on whether researchers should have access to the student data that would allow them to answer key questions.

The disagreement highlights how politicized education research can be — even as access to data is critical to providing the information that might cut through the politics.

“Data are power,” said Katharine Strunk, dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. “That is true in any walk of life. It has grown increasingly political as we have seen the general polarization around public education. It is weaponized, and it doesn’t need to be.”

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