If you’re an education researcher trying to puzzle out the answers to the big questions of the day — such as what works and what doesn’t in public school reform or the effects of charter schools and vouchers on student achievement — New York appears to you, among the constellations of cities and states, an enormous black hole. With the Internet age past its dawn, and into its mid-morning at the least, the city that never sleeps has been busy hitting the snooze button when it comes to making data on its students and schools available to university and institutional researchers. These are people who, out of academic inter est, would do for free (and with less of an agenda) that for which expensive consultants are currently paid.

One such researcher, Caroline Hoxby of Harvard University’s economics department, recently sat down with a group of New York’s leading experts on education and discussed this problem. After giving a briefing on the status of data related to charter schools and vouchers around the nation, and how students are faring under such programs, Ms. Hoxby found herself staring down the question, “What about New York City?” In short, her answer was that no one knows. New York City, it turns out, does not track the progress of individual students passing through its system. While data are available at the district and school level, such data are largely meaningless given the complicated nature of the school system — the economic and racial diversity of the boroughs and districts, the differences between the ordinary and specialized schools. Furthermore, one can’t tell what happens to a student who, say, transfers from a traditional public school to a charter school. “Unless you can really get inside the data,” Ms. Hoxby told The New York Sun, “you have no chance to do any sort of good evaluation.”

What New York City needs to do, Ms. Hoxby told The Sun, is play catch-up with Chicago. We would also be playing catch-up, for that matter, with Tennessee and North Carolina and Texas, which all have excellent statewide data. Specifically, New York City could do far worse than to emulate a program in Chicago called the “Consortium on Chicago School Research.” Founded in 1990, following substantial school reform legislation in the city, the consortium brings together watchdog groups, the school system’s department of research, the Center for School Improvement at the University of Chicago, the school of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Chicago Teachers Union. These groups compile and share data with each other and then vet researchers and share the data with them. The system, according to Ms. Hoxby, al lows school administrators to consult with experts at every turn, and to bring in evaluators at the ground floor when trying novel reforms in the schools. Is this reading program, or that math program, or the other parental involvement program working? Whatever the answer is, there will be data, and there will be experts looking at it.

This is not available in New York City. As schools chancellors rotate in and out at roughly the rate of one every two years, it takes years for trends to emerge. So why can’t Gotham keep up? The cynical might hold out that bureaucrats here don’t want a clear yardstick by which to be measured. The more charitable might suggest that no proper system has been put in place on account of pure bureaucratic inertia; A coherent and computerized system would have been a much taller order 10 years ago, and the idea has yet to catch on.

Working under the more charitable theory, we put forward that it is past due for such an idea here. While more serious reforms to the system, like vouchers, may be years away, there is a first step that can be taken this year, and one which fits quite well with Mr. Bloomberg’s management style. He asked to be given control of the city’s schools and to be held accountable for the results. In the way of holding him accountable, New York City ought to set up a system — maybe even a research consortium like Chicago’s — that would track the progress of every student in New York City’s schools. The data are already in the city’s computers. It already has every student’s graduation status, credits completed, grades, and test scores. This is all confidential material, but, as in other cities, New York would basically encrypt the data, identifying students by numbers, not names. The city’s consortium could then make the data available to credible researchers, such as Ms. Hoxby, who could start fitting New York into the national picture. The cost, if it stayed in line with other states and cities, would be only dollars per student.

The data could even be compiled and released monthly. Ms. Hoxby related at her meeting with New York City education experts her time observing and working with the private Edison Schools company. Teachers in those schools are accustomed to the routine of entering their data into a computer that feeds back to a central office. Individual classes and students are monitored. Problems are detected and resolved quickly. Such a real-time approach may be ambitious for a large public system, but our mayor made his fortune in information systems. He, above anyone, could understand the value of this idea. Unions might object. Bureaucrats may naysay. But many of us will say, how about it, Mr. Bloomberg?