The positive trends in Hispanic educational indicators also extend to high school.

WSJ: Best of the Web Today: The New Nixon

Entitled Opportunities Lost: The Impact of Grade Repetition and Early School Leaving, the Digest presents a wide range of UIS data and indicators to better identify the millions of children that are falling through the cracks in education systems and leaving school, often without being able to read or write.

UNESCO: MEDIA SERVICES

The final result from the workshop was a set of 9 key indicators under the four areas of effective school leadership that could serve as a guide for effective leadership in schools and the evidence required to demonstrate this.

UNESCO: Professional Standards for School Principals: Tuvalu Initial Workshop | United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

Education should have a well-established, well-respected information system that yields varied and comprehensive indicators about kids, teachers, schools and school systems. (Any number of worthy organizations are trying to do something about that, including the Data Quality Campaign, the Council of Great City Schools, and GreatSchools.org).

CNN: STORY HIGHLIGHTS

The government has appointed former Labour minister Alan Milburn to monitor its progress on a series of indicators, including whether top universities are allowing enough state-school educated children in.

BBC: Labour attacks Nick Clegg over social mobility plan

Finally, my thesis adviser in grad school has researched Russian demographics for over 30 years, including during the Brezhnev period when basic demographic indicators were state secrets (he had to painstakingly assemble estimates by laboriously pouring over specialized virology and immunology journals which had a few data points scattered throughout them).

FORBES: A Case Study in the Fecklessness and Idiocy of Russian Liberalism

She has been developing her own indicators, working with schools and local education authorities, using such things as entitlement to free school meals and families' take-up of grants for school uniforms.

BBC: graphic

"Parents find the tables interesting and use them and there is no doubt that putting value-added indicators on is better, but they still don't tell the whole story about what a school is like, " she said.

BBC: What parents want in schools