How Schools and States Are Addressing the Challenge

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Successful organizations – especially corporate ones – use data on a daily basis to measure their results, benchmark their results against competitors and partners, determine what practices are successful and then refine their processes and efforts to improve performance. Tapping into data is a core value and competency in business.

Business leaders can focus their efforts and expertise in a number of specific areas to ensure that states not only build and maintain quality data systems, but that these systems are used by key stakeholders to maximize student achievement and attainment. Specifically, business leaders can:

Support for Longitudinal Data Systems and Improving Educators’ Use of Data

Just as more education leaders are recognizing the need for better data, more states are doing the hard work of addressing that need by building and operationalizing longitudinal data systems. But the work is complex and slow-going. The development of a truly robust system requires a very serious commitment of resources and technical know-how, and states cannot always go it alone.

The Data Quality Campaign (DQC) is a national collaborative to support and encourage state policymakers to improve the collection, availability and use of high-quality education data and to implement state longitudinal data systems to improve student achievement. The campaign aims to provide tools and resources that will assist state development of quality longitudinal data systems, while providing a national forum for reducing duplication of effort and promoting greater coordination and consensus among the organizations focusing on improving data quality, access and use. Created in 2005 by a coalition of 14 national organizations committed to raising education excellence, including Achieve, Inc., and managed by the National Center for Educational Accountability, the DQC’s goal is to have longitudinal data systems in development in all 50 states by 2009.

One of the DQC’s first contributions to supporting states’ efforts was the identification of ten essential elements of a state data system. While only Florida’s longitudinal data system includes all ten at this time, these elements provide a solid framework from which states can and should work. Another eight states have eight or nine elements in place.

The DQC also provides significant assistance to state policymakers in addressing some of the major challenges to building such data systems, including dealing with privacy laws and bridging the gap between K-12 and postsecondary data systems. The DQC also conducts an annual survey on each state’s progress in the development of their longitudinal data systems. To facilitate sharing experiences and lessons learned, the DQC provides state case studies and best practice research that capture state experiences with building and using longitudinal data systems.

In additional, the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) administers the Statewide Longitudinal Data System Grants program. In November 2005, IES awarded the first round of grants to 14 states. In June 2007, IES awarded another 13 state grants to aid in the design and implementation of statewide longitudinal data systems. However, at this point, the grants program applies to K-12 systems and only encourages, rather than mandates, the linking of K-12 and higher education data systems. There is a role here for business to encourage both additional funding for more states to participate and a federal mandate for linking K-12 and postsecondary systems.

Standard & Poor’s and Just for the Kids (JFTK) are two other organizations that have made education data tangible and accessible to educators, administrators, policymakers and parents alike. Standard & Poor’s user-friendly, web-based resource, SchoolMatters.com, provides state, district- and school-level data in a number of areas, including assessments, graduation rates, per pupil expenditures, and student and teacher composition, for nearly every school and district in the country.

JFTK, a non-profit managed by the National Center for Educational Accountability, offers state and district policymakers and educators the ability to access high-quality and comprehensive web-based data analyses and comparisons of school performance and accountability systems across schools, districts and states. JFTK compares each school to demographically-similar high-performing schools to show educators and the community what is possible. JFTK currently is working with 24 state affiliates to identify best practices and actionable policy fixes for school improvement, all of which are contingent on meaningful data collection and analysis at the state and local level. Central to JFTK’s work with states is the use of data in identifying problems and potential solutions.