The Data Game

Discover new ways to reduce costs, empower teachers, and improve student learning using raw numbers.

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As school district officials invest in systems to do the necessary data collection and reporting to state agencies, they are also discovering that the information they gathertest scores, attendance, and demographicscan become assets in surprising ways.
As long as districts need to compile all this stuff, why not put it to additional use? Here are several examples of schools doing more with data. They're turning data into knowledge and using it in ways they never realized they could. What knowledge is hidden in your data?

Deploy teachers to better effect

When Principal Donn Griffitts had to decide where to place one part-time teacher, he and his school planning team turned to state and district assessment data. Almost every teacher at San Altos Elementary School in Lemon Grove, California, could make an anecdotal case for more support. But the numbers showed that a large percentage of fifth graders in 200304 were performing below proficient level in language arts, specifically in vocabulary and reading comprehension. In conjunction with gaining extra teacher support, the at-risk students received an additional 45 minutes a day of corrective reading and three hours a week of after-school intervention. Some schools use test results to make informed decisions about resources, curriculum pacing, and grouping children. At Findley Oaks Elementary School in Duluth, Georgia, Principal Steve Curry's planning team reviews classroom performance and teacher input together with results of the state-mandated Criterion Referenced Competency Test (CRCT). The test measures student achievement based on the state's Quality Core Curriculum objectives. If the review shows a weakness in reading, the school may hire additional part-time teachers and paraprofessionals or reassign teachers to bolster areas of need.

Keep tabs on absences

With data at their fingertips, teachers at Patrick Henry Middle School in Cleveland reduced unexcused absences from approximately 9 percent to 2 percent of all attendance in the 200304 school year. Mark Quinn, technology professional developer at the school, used a software package called Business Objects 5.1 to query the district's student-information system. He e-mailed teachers a weekly report of all unexcused absences to date, organized by grade, homeroom, and student. Teachers worked down their lists to contact parents and find out why students had skipped school that day. "It saved time," says Quinn. "Instead of going to the attendance person to get a report, they had the information. There could be a discrepancy between their record and the school record. This pooled what was officially recorded."

To address persistent problems, Quinn created a report for the attendance liaison showing all absences. The liaison used the information to question parents and work with students to improve attendance. The school surpassed district requirements for unexcused absences.

Find hidden money

By integrating data and making that easily available, some districts find untapped financial resources. In Claremore (OK) Public Schools, each site manages its education data with STIOffice from Software Technology. Each day, Terri Kay Myers, the district's software coordinator, uploads all the schools' data using STIDistrict and reviews the information on one database. By examining this student-records management system, she found that more than 1,100 students in the 4,100-student district had been identified by their parents as Native American. Only about 300 students, however, had completed the 506 form required to collect available federal funds. Using Myers's data, the district contacted parents and increased its 506 population from 300 to 1,100 students, resulting in a 72 percent increase
in funding.

Empower your teachers

Several district officials use assessment data to establish benchmarks for teachers as well as for students. By doing so, officials can identify weaknesses and then apply professional-development resources to a particular area of the curriculum, by grade level or by subject area, to improve student outcomes.
Idaho was one of the first states to adopt mandatory and statewide computer-based testing for the Idaho Student Achievement Test (ISAT) to assess students' skills across all districts. As a result, the state has a rich resource of student-assessment data to mine for decision-making. Last year, state evaluators identified a weakness in middle school math skills. To combat the problem, they created a summer school, the Math Academy, for middle school math teachers to learn new ways to instruct. "It's not the teachers' fault," says Dawn Wilson, educational technology coordinator for the Bureau of Technology Services. "They may not have been aware of strategies."

In some cases, teachers can help themselves. Sally Ahern, a third-grade teacher at San Miguel Elementary School in Lemon Grove, California, knew that her English Language Learners were not low achievers but rather students with weak and strong areas. She consulted data on student assessment, but her efforts were time-consuming and she could not always find what she needed. "Last spring looking at test scores, I had hunches about kids," says Ahern. "I knew they were weak in that area or I knew I went over it too quickly." To effectively sort and analyze data, Ahern now queries the district's Instructional Data Management System (IDMS) from ETS Pulliam. These assessments allow her to determine how her English Language Learners are doing. She knows which students need help with which standards to excel, and she can group them together for targeted instruction.

Solve mysteries

Sandra Cokeley, director of quality and community relations for Pearl River (NY) School District, always believed her district was focused on academic performance, but it kept losing students. When she and her staff looked into why enrollment declined despite a growing community population, they started with the numbers. They discovered that the enrollment drop occurred between the eighth and ninth grades, and that the students who left were the top performers.

It turned out that those students had enrolled in college-prep private schools because they and their parents did not feel that Pearl River adequately prepared them for higher education. By identifying the cause of the problem, the district was able to solve it by addressing academics, student satisfaction, and community awareness. Enrollment in the public school increased from 71 percent to 90 percent of eligible students, and in 2001 the district received one of the first Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Awards for performance excellence in education.

Run the numbers

Data-driven decision-making is not just for instruction. Districts also use the information to improve technology performance and reduce costs.
With 88 schools and 13 administrative sites, Fulton County (GA) Schools use a centralized help desk to quickly resolve problems, measure system performance, and identify technology needs. At least one technology specialist in each school and the shared support personnel in the administrative offices troubleshoot problems before escalating issues to the help desk if necessary. Their requests go directly into a help desk system from Front Range Solutions, where the data are analyzed. Katie Lovett, chief information officer, and her staff use the results to track their effectiveness in meeting district goals for technology. "We don't just go back and say I think'there has to be data to home in on the priority," says Lovett. "We constantly use data to improve the quality of service and to measure how well the people are doing, how well the technology is doing."

Jim Hirsch, assistant superintendent for technology, estimates that without blocking software, Plano (TX) Independent School District would lose $624,000 per year because of spam. At the district, all e-mail arrives at Novell Netmail, equipped with RBLs and McAfee. If the e-mail passes, it moves to TrendMicro and through Interscan VirusWall and Content Manager for filter management. For final delivery, e-mail arrives at GroupWise Gateway Manager. Hirsch regularly analyzes the number of messages delivered by Novell Netmail and those blocked by TrendMicro to determine how effective the systems are and to estimate technology costs. In August, the district handled 3.3 million e-mail messages and blocked 950,000. Hirsch estimates that 28,000 spam messages were not blocked. Using the number of employees with e-mail, the number of workdays, the average hourly salary, and an estimate of five seconds wasted per junk message, Hirsch calculated spam costs for each employee and for the district.

Karen Greenwood Henke, founder of Nimble Press, is a writer and speaker specializing in computing and communications technology for K12 schools. She is the author of two white papers on data-driven decision-making available from the Consortium for School Networking. They are available at http://cosn.org.

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