Data Analytics in Education and Management Decision Styles in the Evidence-based Development of Education

Introduction: The development of data culture is considered today as a social norm of the "information society". The leaders of education systems are faced with the task of consolidating the activities of "data evangelists", "it-evangelists" (technology evangelists) in education quality management systems. Data analyst competencies should dominate management decision-making. When examining the influence of relevant competencies on the style of management decision-making, we proceed from the existing technological data infrastructure in Russia, and also take into account the role of the public sector in quality control of education. Materials and methods: A review of foreign and domestic sources on the problems of evidence-based management in education has been undertaken. Various aspects of the problem are compared: intercountry and subnational contexts; revealed the role of international comparative research in the development of data analytics competencies. It was studied, using the Alan Rowe methodology, the influence of data analytics competencies on the style of making management decisions. The study sample consisted of 350 people. The author's case simulators were used for the built-in diagnostics of data analytics competencies. Results: The empirical facts of the change in the style of making management decisions under the influence of the competencies of data analytics have been obtained. The relevant competencies were the subject of training for the heads of regional education systems on the basis of the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. The connection between the competencies of data analytics of the conceptual and analytical style of making management decisions with the content and methodology of training managers has been substantiated. A list of competencies of data analytics for scaling in the practices of training subjects of management of educational systems has been formulated. Discussion and conclusions: The novelty of our proposed solutions lies in the substantiation of the influence of data analytics competencies on the style of management decision-making. We expand the boundaries of the data-driven paradigm of education quality management and consider such systems in the logic of the information-analytical paradigm, where the competence of data analytics is both a condition and a resource for evidence-based education development. Conclusions are formulated about the development of a new type of culture in public administration - data-culture. Data as a valuable asset in a state with a developed data culture changes the ontology of the information state and logically leads to the idea of a new social contract.