Improving decisions with data.

Schools gather, store and use an increasingly large amount of data. Keeping track of everything from bus routes to building access codes to test scores to sports equipment is done with the help of electronic database programs. Large databases designed for budgeting and student record keeping have long been an integral part of the educational landscape.

Student information systems such as NCS/Pearson's SASIxp, Skyward, Power-School and other commercial and home-grown programs are primarily designed to hold data, conduct simple searches and create pre-constructed reports. But a continuing trend toward data-driven decision making and educational accountability requires school leaders not to just store data but use it in increasingly sophisticated ways.

Administrators will face, if they haven't already, five particular challenges in their use of data.

* Harnessing more powerful data tools and greater amounts of data.

Spotting trends in dropout rates, grade inflation, gender or racial biases and truancy are all possible using reports generated from student information systems. But thoughtful, combined efforts of curriculum specialists, assessment specialists, building administrators and technology department staff are creating tools that extract and interpret data in even more powerful ways.

These data-warehousing and data-mining operations do the following: Keep information from multiple assessments about individual students' progress from year to year; export data for timely state reports; identify individuals or groups of students whose performance is outside the standard range; track, identify and isolate the interventions that affect student performance; and analyze the effectiveness of programs and improvement plans.

The concept behind data-driven decision making is that certain sets of data (indicators) can be used to determine whether programs or circumstances (interventions) have an effect on certain types of students (identifiers).

The database search feature needs to enable the user to find and understand the data through sorting, filtering and summarizing. At a basic level, the user can sort by multiple combinations of each of these areas:

Identifiers: Identification of the person or group. These are factors that are not changeable or controllable. (Name, ethnicity, gender, grade level, date of enrollment, teacher, socio-economic background, attendance rate, etc.)

Interventions: The programs, strategies or other factors that may cause or may be correlated with change. (Summer school, Title I, special education, ESL, gifted and talented, special reading, specific teachers, etc.)

Indicators: The data that indicate the extent to which change has occurred. (Test scores, course grades, GPA, attendance, etc.)

* Granting teacher, parent and community access to data.

Administrators need to recognize that the desire for access to data is growing. Teachers want access to determine the growth of individuals and groups of students and to help create site-driven school improvement plans.

Parents want to compare the performance of their own children and school to that of normed groups and other schools. Communities and states want to identify high- and low-performing schools.

Providing appropriate, accurate and secure web-enabled access to specific information is a growing expectation of each of these groups.

* Planning and using interoperability standards.

Well-designed databases share information with other databases. Compatibility of shared data is increasing because of the School Interoperability Format (www.sifinfo.org).

Basic information about students can be imported into library automation systems, school lunch programs, online gradebooks and special education reporting databases. Data from national norm-reference tests can be imported into school systems. Such data sharing both decreases the clerical time needed to maintain such systems and makes the data more accurate.

* Guaranteeing integrity, privacy and security.

One of the oldest acronyms in the computer world is GIGO: Garbage In Garbage Out. School administrators need to understand not just how to access and use the information in school information systems, but how to write and enforce policies that maintain the integrity of the data they contain.

Because the reports of student population, daily attendance and other data are used to determine state and national funding, the accuracy of data becomes a legal issue. With remote access to data, security and privacy issues must be carefully considered.

Building data analysis and interpretation skills.

Few of us are statisticians at heart, but the need to make meaning out of raw data is a skill administrators, teachers and parents need to develop. Differentiating between cause and correlation, knowing whether a number is significant and identifying trends are skills that require training and practice. Badly used data can cause harm.

Of all the technology skills required of educational leaders, the ability to make good decisions using meaningful data is probably the most challenging. As budgets tighten, these skills help determine what programs improve student performance and should be funded. Using data wisely helps us do just that.

Doug Johnson is director of media and technology, Mankato Public Schools, P.O. Box 8713, Mankato, MN 56002. E-mail: [e-mail]