Meet Andrew Scott Pyle, QIP Communications Specialist
“Scott brings a broad yet unique set of skills to our team. His experience in academic writing, project management, and technical writing—and his knowledge of so many other languages—makes him a versatile and precise writer,” said QIP Editorial Director Sarah Ensor. “He is also excellent at identifying new methods and ideas to improve upon the product development process.”
At QIP, Scott is the Communications and Content team’s liaison to the National Forum on Education Statistics (Forum), “a voluntary, democratic, participative group that is committed to improving the quality, comparability, and usefulness of elementary and secondary education data while remaining sensitive to data burden concerns.” Its mission “is to plan, recommend, and develop education data resources that will support local, state, and national efforts to improve public and private education throughout the United States.”
Forum working groups, which include representatives of state and local education agencies (SEAs and LEAs) from across the country, develop extensive best practice guides on a number of critical education data topics. Scott, along with analysts and researchers from QIP, supports the working groups in drafting, reviewing, and formatting these guides, each of which includes several cases studies from SEAs and LEAs. The process of creating one guide from start to finish typically lasts about a year.
“It’s a long, collaborative process, and our job at QIP is to bring it all together,” he said.
Resources Scott has worked on include the Forum Guide to Data Governance, Forum Guide to Cybersecurity: Safeguarding Your Data, Forum Guide to Strategies for Education Data Collection and Reporting (SEDCAR), and School Courses for the Exchange of Data (SCED) Uses and Benefits.
Scott’s employment with QIP has coincided almost entirely with the COVID-19 pandemic, which has presented unique challenges to the entire education community and quickly allowed him to see the importance of the Forum.
“There’s this great need for education agencies to know that somebody is helping them,” he said.
For example, a big issue now is student attendance, and how to measure it accurately when some students are attending school in person, others are in distance learning, and some are in a combination of the two, he said.
“There are a lot of questions that nobody has answered before, and the Forum is in a position to help them find those answers,” Scott said.
Scott earned his undergraduate degree, a Bachelor of Arts in French studies, from Washington College and his Ph.D. from Emory University.
Before joining QIP, he worked as a French instructor at Emory University; a content coordinator and language specialist; a translator; and a project manager and content creator.
