Education Week - Managing the Digital District - October 2, 2013 - S20

Intelligent Data Analysis
Helps Predict Needs
Getting ahead of the curve
can prevent future failures
C
By Michelle R.
Davis
alifornia’s Sanger Unified School District was
collecting vast amounts of data on students for
years, from absences to test scores and grades.
But that information was stored in a variety of
systems, teachers couldn’t access it in a timely
manner, and educators didn’t have the digital
tools they needed to help them use the data to
improve instruction.
Now, the bulk of student data is housed in a
consolidated student-information system that
teachers can use to create assessments, score them, and get the
results analyzed immediately, giving them the power to adjust
their teaching based on what they’re seeing and analyzing in real
time. Gone are the days of waiting weeks, or even months, to get
data about student academic performance.
“It’s had a huge impact,” said Dan Grossnicklaus, the studentinformation-systems
manager for the 11,000-student district. “In
the past, the results were more like an autopsy—not much you
can do after the fact. Now there can be an intervention before a
student leaves the class.”
Districts are taking a hard look at the data they have, adding
to the information and presenting it to educators in user-friendly
ways. Those facts and figures are informing decisions about the
deployment of valuable school resources and, in some places, are
being shared in a transparent way.
In the Sanger schools, for example, the district deliberately
opens up data at all levels. Teachers regularly share studentperformance
results with their teams to identify areas
where instruction wasn’t successful. Data may show one
teacher had good results with a concept, while students
of another teacher struggled. Data from classrooms,
departments, and schools are also shared regularly
at higher levels at an annual principals’ summit, Mr.
Grossnicklaus said. Principals present data that they’ve
analyzed on the performance of their schools, down to the
classroom level, to the district administration.
“The principals analyze the data and highlight where the holes
are and where they’re going to make the changes needed,” Mr.
Grossnicklaus said. “It’s a pretty high-stakes presentation.”
With all this focus on hard numbers, there’s no hiding flaws,
he said. The process requires trust that there won’t be a focus on
failings, but on how to improve. The district had to negotiate with
the local teachers’ union to be able to share such data, Mr. Grossnicklaus
said.
THINKING STRATEGICALLY
Like the Sanger schools, many other districts are already collecting
statistics on students. The problem is they haven’t figured
out how to use the information strategically to improve student
achievement, said Vera Turner of AASA, the School Superintendents
Association, who is the group’s project manager for the
Closing the Gap initiative. Along with the Consortium for School
Networking, or CoSN, AASA created the initiative to provide districts
with free resources to help them choose a learning management
system or a student-information system, and to help train educators
in how to organize a data initiative and share best practices
around data use.
“In this current environment, there’s a growing need for accountability
and educational data,” Ms. Turner said. “This project
came about because of a lack of resources to help educators use
data more effectively.”
That’s what the 184,000-student Fairfax County, Va., district is
doing with its Electronic Curriculum Assessment Resource Tool,
or eCART, system, said Aron M. Sterling, the eCART manager for
the district, which is working with the Closing the Gap project.
The system is a central repository for teachers to find and share
content, lessons, documents, and other learning resources. Teachers
collaborate using eCART to build assessments, and the system
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analyzes data not only from a particular student, class, school, or
school cluster, but also longitudinally, a feature added this year,
Mr. Sterling said.
Development of eCART has evolved over the past decade, and it
continues to change, he said.
“Part of this is the understanding of the importance of data
and where data lies,” he said. “We talk about what type of data
should be collected and how much is too much. It’s a real, ongoing
conversation.”
This school year, the Fairfax County district rolled out a more
user-friendly search engine for the system around curriculum
resources. It now resembles a shopping search through Amazon
rather than a more generalized Google search, Mr. Sterling said.
“Teachers wanted an easy way to filter results. They wanted to
know which resources are vetted, which are in-house or which
are external,” he said. The district is also adding another way of
collecting data: teacher feedback and ratings on those resources.
Adam Schechter, an 8th grade civics teacher at Mark Twain
Middle School in the Fairfax County district, said the eCART system
helps his team of civics teachers drill down to evaluate where
students have struggled on a particular question or standard. If
it appears one teacher had difficulty getting that concept across,
another teacher who had success can provide strategies for improvement.

“We’re not judging one teacher against another. It’s a more collaborative
effort,” Mr. Schechter said. “We encourage teachers to
get past the idea that they’re on their own little island.”
EMPOWERING STUDENTS
In Gwinnett County, Ga., district officials said a new feature of
their data system will allow teachers to note, at a glance, whether
students are struggling or at risk, said Steven W. Flynt, the chief
strategy and performance officer for the 168,000-student school
system. Dubbed ABC reports—for a focus on attendance, behavior,
and course completion—the data system shows each student’s
name in red for struggling, yellow for at risk, or green for doing
well based on data in those three areas. The system can vary the
data to allow teachers to look at subgroups or across classes.
In the future, Mr. Flynt said, the district plans to improve the
system so that it begins making recommendations to teachers for
interventions based on the academic difficulties the data reflect.
In Henry County, Ga., leaders of the 40,000-student district are
putting data into the hands of students as well as educators. The
district is in its second year using a new learning management
system, Edgenuity, for classes that blend online and face-to-face
learning, and Schoolnet for more traditional classes. Through both
systems, students take quizzes and tests—all tied to state standards—and
can later view not only their overall results, but also
their performance on a particular standard or question. Students
monitor their own progress toward mastering standards.
In addition, the district is piloting a program in the blended
learning portion of its Locust Grove Middle School this school
year that goes one step further. Students there spend two hours a
day working independently on their courses through the learning
management system, said Aaryn Schmuhl, the assistant superintendent
for learning and leadership services. Using the data collected
on their progress, students themselves decide what seminar
classes to attend later in the day. Students can also measure their
own progress toward course completion, Mr. Schmuhl said.
The district hopes to expand the pilot project to other schools in
the future.
“The students describe it as getting to own their own education,”
Mr. Schmuhl said. “They can see the goals and where they need to
get to, and they control how to get there.”
Aside from getting the data to students and teachers to change
instruction, other data initiatives are aimed at the district level.
The Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Strategic Data
Project, launched in 2008, focuses on delving into numbers related
to teacher hiring, deployment, and retention, as well as
college readiness. The project sends Harvard graduate students
to work with districts, drill down into their data, and use what
they glean to change decisionmaking, said Thomas J. Kane, a
professor of education and economics at the graduate school
and the faculty director for the Center for Education Policy Research,
which oversees the project.
“
The principals
analyze the data and
highlight where the
holes are and where
they’re going to make
the changes needed.”
DAN GROSSNICKLAUS
Student-Information-Systems Manager
Sanger, Calif., Unified Schools
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