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AEP Online |
Data-Driven Jeanne Hayes of QEDMore than once in her career, Jeanne Hayes has arrived by chance at what turned out to be an ideal destination. After completing a college English major, Chicago-born Hayes "reluctantly" became a teacher--as her father had insisted--only to find out that she loved teaching high school English. Her move into education data and trends, a field in which she would become truly a pioneer, was just as serendipitous. Hayes had moved to Denver, CO, with her husband, Tom, who was completing his internship in psychology. After teaching there for a year, Hayes, pregnant, resigned from her job--as was expected at the time. "I did so, not even thinking, then (it was 1969), that I should protest it," she remembers. After her son, Colin, was born, she tried to get back into teaching, but was told her years of experience made her "too expensive" to hire. Hayes spotted a newspaper ad for a job collecting data about school districts by phone; teachers were the preferred candidates. Curriculum Information Centers represented a first, she says: "There was no such thing as a database of school administrators by job function--even though textbook company fortunes were made at the district level." But there were problems: "Every day, we'd hear a door slam closed--because we didn't understand what our computer services company had done to update personnel information. Lists didn't come back looking the way we expected." It was then Hayes found out that maintaining a brand new, then mainframe, database, was another job she loved. Surprisingly, she was able to do that work without any formal training. "It was a matter of listening to what customers wanted and seeing what we could create," she says. "I was fascinated by the logic of it." In 1978, CIC was purchased by Market Data Retrieval, which also had come up in the '70s. With funding from National Business Lists, a business-to-business mailing lists company, Hayes established Quality Education Data in 1981. Its initial aims were similar to CIC's. But as soon as 1984, she had new ambitions. "I remember very vividly getting the new thing--an IBM personal computer. Asked, jokingly, if I was going to 'play with it,' I said, 'No! I've been paying hourly charges all my life at service bureaus. Now, I'm going to be able to control my own data!' "And that's when I really got into it," she says. "By hand, I typed information about the top 200 districts into a dBase II spreadsheet. That was one of my real passions: to be able to look at data, to see what was important, and to provide that to the customer visually--in graphs and charts." Eventually, her interest evolved; she was not just using what were then called "microcomputers," but examining who else used them and at what level. Again from her own computer, she sent letters to those top 200 districts, asking if they anticipated spending more or less on technology in the coming year. In 1987, QED published the first of its Education Technology Trends reports. Sometimes, QED has even been a step ahead of official sources on technology issues. "In the early '90s there was no research comparing technology access--what was later termed the 'digital divide,' " Hayes says. "We correlated demographic data showing schools' percentage of children who qualified for free lunch against the number of computers they had in those schools. "We were able to demonstrate--before the National Center for Education Statistics had--that there truly was a difference. And then we were able to demonstrate that the difference was declining with Title I, and then E-Rate, funding." In 1999, QED, which was previously owned by the college-information company Peterson's, was acquired by K-12 leader Scholastic--a more fitting match, she says. Now Hayes, a re-energized breast cancer survivor, has as her stomping grounds an even bigger database, with more than two million customer transactions a year. Questions, ideas, or in need of more information? Please contact Stacey Pusey at 856-241-7772. |
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