This is a guest blog by Tara N. Tucci, a Strategic Data Fellow at Pittsburgh Public Schools. She was formerly a senior research and policy associate at the Alliance for Excellent Education in Washington, DC.
When I arrived in Washington, DC, in 2008 to do policy work for the Alliance for Excellent Education, I had no idea that I was about to witness one of the most exciting times in federal education policy. During my time there, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act brought about Race to the Top and a restructuring of School Improvement Grants, the House and Senate both marked up bills to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), and the Obama administration created an opportunity for states to obtain waivers for flexibility from ESEA.
Mine was just one of a whole chorus of voices encouraging policymakers to leverage these historic policies to promulgate the collection and use of data at the local level.
Data was indeed a prominent thread through all of these policy initiatives, incentivizing an unprecedented amount of data collection. But in our advocacy, my colleagues and I were primarily focused on making districts data rich—we paid far less attention to how those agencies would go about turning all the new data into information that drives sound action to improve student outcomes.
Data Alone Aren’t Enough
This summer I had the honor of joining Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS) as a fellow through the Strategic Data Project at Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research. Like many other districts, PPS had to go through a significant cultural transformation to become an agency that valued data and was willing to invest its scarce resources to collect what is now an impressive amount of data. Over the past several years, particularly through its Empowering Effective Teachers effort funded by the Gates Foundation, PPS has captured the voices of teachers, parents, and students through regularly administered surveys; has developed value-added measures both for teachers and schools; is refining the way it captures and defines attendance and suspension data; and is working to build sound college-readiness measures and predictors.
Now that Pittsburgh has this wealth of data, however, a second transformation is necessary to move itself from data rich yet information poor to information rich and action wise. Triangulating these multiple sources of data into information that drives action is a capacity that most districts lack, because it was never a necessary function of the old compliance-driven central office. So districts like Pittsburgh need to create that capacity, which requires a focus on everything from revamping data and reporting systems so as to make data easily and broadly accessible, to building knowledge on how to use data among key players throughout the district—all the way from central office staff to principals and teachers.
Becoming an Information-Rich District
This development is not quick, nor is it easy. It requires building new structures and processes, a huge communication focus, and significant time and resources to ensure that all players are able to turn data into information and action. Districts must struggle with questions like, How do we provide so much data in a timely way to those who need it? How can we offer professional development to our principals on turning data into action when we’re still building our own data capacity at the central office? How do we communicate what all of these data mean individually, let alone how they should be used together to drive action? What processes must we establish to ensure that key decisions around support for students, teachers, and leaders are informed by data?
Luckily, districts are not struggling with this by themselves. That is why organizations like the Data Quality Campaign and the Strategic Data Project are especially valuable—they help create a community around data use so that we’re not left to re-create the wheel in every district across the county.
At the same time, I encourage policymakers to consider how to do more to support this second transformation districts must make, to effectively use their new wealth of data. It is particularly critical that the national conversation around local data explores how school districts use state-level investments. Too often local data users don’t know about state resources and how to tap them in service of work already happening at the local level. Resources could be wasted by states creating resources that districts don’t use, or by districts re-creating tools already available from the state.
The last thing we want is to squander this sea change toward the value of data, leaving districts unable to fully translate data into action to improve student outcomes. A concerted focus on supporting districts to use data will help ensure that sound, data-driven action at the local level is no longer the goal, but instead the norm.
