Over the years we have been involved in the implementation of many Instructional Improvement Systems (IIS). The objective of these systems is to produce solid instructional decisions that when implemented provide more effective teaching practices throughout a school or district.

These systems have been both a source and a user of the analytical data stored by our longitudinal data systems. I would like to share what we have seen that has worked as well as approaches that have been less successful.

When supplied with accurate and detailed data, IIS present teachers with recommendations for specific lesson plans for individual students and groups of students. While these systems may make excellent recommendations, we have found that the application of these systems in the classroom is frequently unsuccessful. One of the major reasons is because many Instructional Systems are designed as a “black box.” Data is inserted into the system and recommendations are made with little explanation. Teachers have shared with us that typical Instructional Improvement Systems are too rigid, provide too few choices to choose from (lessons, timing, etc) and provide little wiggle room for the teacher to implement the prescribed recommendations for the individual and/or group of students.

We believe that it is critical to engage teachers in the decision process with a transparent solution that is supported by the data. We also believe that it is critical that recommendations provide visibility to measured results.

The most successful IIS provide both meaningful data, as well as multiple choices for the teacher. Interestingly, some of the most successful systems in the past were home grown and were substantially less sophisticated than some that failed, but were still accepted because they engaged the teachers and made them an integral part of the decision process.

As the education market shifts towards personalization and data becomes more prevalent within daily decision making, one of the questions becomes: what is the validity of IIS and what is their impact in the long run? Do IIS improve the learning results of students? At this point, we don’t have any clear conclusions however it is clear that a system that engages teachers in the decision process with both meaningful data and choice, results in teachers being more receptive. This leads me to hypothesize that an IIS that informs the teacher and allows the teacher to make decisions will improve faster than systems that rely on black box algorithms.

I look forward to sharing more about this trend as we engage with both teachers and parents and dig further into the billions of records of data we are accumulating.

Shawn

The Common Core State Standards Initiative (Common Core) and related efforts play an essential role in helping the education community as a whole achieve personalized education.  From a student’s perspective the Common Core provides the pathway for developing constructive skills for each individual student, while avoiding education anarchy.  The debate that efforts such as the Common Core will narrow a student’s educational experience and lead to less differentiation is mute as our work with states and local districts and institutions shows a great synergy between skills and personalized education.   The development of the Common Core is an important effort moving us in the direction of understanding of the progression of skills that can serve as the foundation on which personalized education can be built.

Many people are now coming to the understanding that a personalized approach to education can be very powerful, particularly if students can focus their educational progress toward their own individual goals.  One of the challenges with personalized education is avoiding what we think of as educational anarchy.  “If I get to pursue my goals, I might just ignore essential skills I don’t like and avoid foundational learning to get to “the good stuff.”   The Common Core and related efforts play an essential role in helping us achieve personalized education and yet avoid anarchy.

The common understanding of skills and ability to track their progression is an essential first step in constructing a map of the inner-relationships between skills.   A great deal of work has will continue to be done to understand how the acquisition of one skill builds the foundation to acquire another.   This additional level of detail makes it possible to support a student toward proficiency with a new skill.  In addition to the Common Core, there continues to be a great deal of important work in defining skill acquisition pathways.   This powerful information has always needed a common structure to hang it on so these pathways can be used to achieve commonly understood educational milestones.   The Common Core provides this structure.

One of the questions often discussed is the Common Core’s fundamental reference to grade level.  We view the Common Core’s impact to represent a progression of skill acquisition that would get a student to an accepted level of proficiency over a P-12 career.   The Common Core will help establish that common structure to allow  variation from the timeframes based on the progress of either individuals or groups of students.   Having that common base structure also makes it possible to understand how a student could move from one curriculum to another without being either “lost,” or worse bored.

We are very excited to be working with some of the states that are leading in the definition and implementation of the Common Core and learning more how it is helping us achieve our mission of helping each individual achieve the most effective education possible.

I initially sat down to discuss and capture the impact of No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001 has had on education.  I realize quite a bit has been written about the unintended negative consequences, and the challenges associated with measuring the education students are receiving.  One element that is often overlooked within the conversation is the data being collected and how data can be used moving forward.  The work we have all put into “getting the data right” for accountability purposes, when done well, has created a foundation of clean, consistent and detailed data that can be used to help individual students achieve.

We are now seeing some of the most progressive educational agencies beginning to turn data into initiatives that support the personalization of education.  These initiatives improve individual success and in aggregate improve the accountability measures for all the subgroups that contain those individual students.   We are getting to the place where our accountability systems are being used directly to improve education, not just to identify areas where improvement is needed.

It is generally understood that the Texas Education Agency (TEA) has done an excellent job implementing and using data to drive accountability for many years.  In fact, to a significant extent, Texas was a key influence for NCLB.  TEA has realized that they have gained great insight and value from understanding both successes and failures at an aggregate level and that the next phase of growth and improvement will come from helping individual students in classrooms achieve success.  They have also found that the ability to collect and cleanse data at a detailed level is essential to this objective.  This thinking is behind their District Facing Data Warehouse initiative in which TEA is partnering with eScholar and the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation.

eScholar has played a key role in the application of data for many of today’s largest SEAs and LEAs.  We have always worked with individual districts and institutions, who have been primarily focused on individual student achievement, while at the same time, helping states meet their accountability reporting requirements with the same products.  Since we have been focused on individual students at the local level, we are prepared for and very excited about this evolution of thinking at the state level.

There are many benefits to this shift that will be played out over the next couple of years; 1) SEAs get to wring substantial new value out of data they have already been collecting; 2) districts, institutions (and students) can benefit from valuable personalization capabilities across the state, not just in a few districts; and 3) these systems can support students seamlessly as they move from district to district and as they progress from P-12 into postsecondary education.

This is a very exciting time to be in this industry as we are dramatically increasing our ability to use data to personalize education.  It is ironic to think that NCLB, which in many respects is such a blunt instrument, helped get us to this point.

This blog was created to share with readers our observations and insights into how data are being deployed, the outcomes achieved (both good and bad), and insights that may be helpful to others.  I know this conversation will benefit from different perspectives and I welcome your feedback.

Also, if you believe there are topics where our perspective on the exciting data work occurring across the country could be helpful, please feel free to ask.

Wishing us all success in the most important endeavor there is- education.

Shawn

The shift in data use from compliance to improving education outcomes is well underway.  Happening across the nation, district level implementations of data rich environments are creating adaptive systems that are improving the education of students.  This is evidenced by the adoption of early alert/warning systems, the rise of personalized interventions, as well as initiatives, including Race to the Top and the pending Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) in 2014.

As data systems mature, the appetite for data-centric environments increases.  The collection of longitudinal data has begun to influence practices at the district level and has shifted the need for data to the classroom, as well as the other direct participants in the education process.  Today, districts are tracking progress across school years to predict future performance, and evaluate connections among outcomes and classroom experiences to help inform interventions, classroom and school practices, and district and state policies.

So, what is the role of the State Education Agency (SEA) with this pending shift?  For the past several years, states have been busy deploying and upgrading Longitudinal Data Systems primarily to capture and organize billions of detailed education records.  This data is summarized into reports for the many accountability requirements that have been enacted over the past decade, including EDEN/EDFacts, AYP and much more.  Building upon previous reporting that looked at isolated snapshots in time, current reporting requires consistent data across time so change can be easily tracked.  This has required implementation of thousands of data quality rules at the elemental level, just so the aggregated facts are consistent.   Now that required reports look at changes in the aggregate performance of ethnic groups over time, it is very important to understand how much change is attributable to change in the reported ethnicities of individuals (more than you might think) and how much is attributable to the performance of members of the group.  This and literally thousands of other situations must be managed just to have accountability data that represents a true picture of system performance.

Of course, understanding system performance and accountability is only the first step.  The same data that is being captured, cleansed and organized for accountability can be extremely valuable in the performance improvement process.  Over the years, districts have deployed data to identify opportunities to improve curriculum, identify students in need of additional help and more recently to begin to deliver truly personalized educational pathways.   Although districts have found that these initiatives can be highly successful, they have also found that developing and maintaining the underlying data systems can be an enormous and expensive task.  As a result, generally only large, or wealthy districts have had these powerful systems at their disposal.   So, what about the vast majority of districts that are not large, or wealthy?

This is where SEAs have found a very valuable new role to play.  A number of them now have at least some of the data that districts need in order to help students and they have it for all the districts, large, small, rich and poor.  The statewide systems they have deployed can offer the capabilities districts need and the economies of scale to leverage data to help every student in the state.  SEAs are beginning to deliver value back to districts with reporting and data-driven applications that take advantage of data cleansing and collection that is already being done.  They are also taking a leadership role in understanding how data is used to create a more effective environment at each level.  The result is more collaborative data environments that feed the SEA requirements, better support the individual school districts and increase teachers ability to make timely decisions to improve interactions with students.  One example is the vision of the Texas Education Agency (TEA) to create a statewide district-facing warehouse for its more than 1,250 districts and almost five million students.  Texas has been a leader in collecting and leveraging data at the state level for more than 20 years and some of its districts have been on the leading edge of using data to help improve education.  TEA is looking to combine these successes and simultaneously improve state data collection and improve the use of data for all districts, large and small.

Texas’ deployment of a district facing warehouse will provide access to valuable operational and student-level information from which to make decisions.  The information that is collected ranges from student attendance records to assessment results, financial budgets and will support the analytic and reporting needs of SEAs to a wide range of stakeholders and users, including administrators at all levels, teachers, counselors, support staff and students.  This vision is well represented at The Texas Data System.

A recent whitepaper from the Data Quality Campaign, dated May, 2011 “Leveraging the Power of State Longitudinal Data Systems” did a nice job of outlining the level of classroom analysis and questions that an SEA will be able to answer when data is collected and accessed correctly.  This includes:

• Teacher value-added analysis
• Student annual growth model
• Regression analysis to determine the amount of student test score variability that can be attributed to teachers or schools
• Correlation between student course grades and scores on state/district assessments
• Analyses of student performance one to three years later

eScholar sees every day working with our district and state partners, that data, when captured, organized and analyzed, can greatly influence the education process.  The market continues to mature, identify new ways to align the data closer to the student and create efficiencies through the use of data.

This blog was created to share with readers our observations and insights into how data is being deployed, the outcomes achieved (both good and bad), and insights that may be helpful to others.  I know this conversation will benefit from different perspectives and I welcome your feedback.

Also, if you believe there are topics where our perspective on the exciting data work occurring across the country could be helpful, please feel free to ask.

Wishing us all success in the most important endeavor there is- education.

Shawn

This inaugural blog goes to the heart of what we focus on at eScholar  ― utilizing education data to drive collaboration that helps students succeed.

Today, everyone understands that data is valuable in improving education. As the leader in providing, collecting and organizing educational data, we have a unique vantage point from which to observe practices that work and those that don’t. My objective with this blog is to create an interactive platform from which to share some of the successes that we are seeing among our partners in the education industry. It is my hope that as the blog matures you will provide comments, propose topics and share insights into what you are seeing in the education market (both good and bad).

The rate of adoption and breadth of progress in how data is being successfully deployed by the individual user is breathtaking. We see data being used to improve decisions on broad policy issues at both the state and national level. We witness data being used daily at the district level to evaluate programs and initiatives and by teachers to evaluate individual student progress and their own teaching practices. It is at this point, when data is used at the individual level, the whole equation changes.

At the individual level, a teachers use of data varies based on the technology prowess of the district. In some of the more advanced districts, teachers are tracking progress of individual students to understand when students have mastered a concept and can move on, as well as when a lesson missed the mark for a group of students. We have also seen data put to work directly with individual students to set and achieve their individual goals, in the form of initiatives such as interventions, personalized education plans, goal planning and more.

The use of data and its analysis influences daily practices and curriculums to drive systemic change to create student-centric learning. Many students share similar needs and goals but the full combination possessed by one individual is unlikely to exist in any other. We are seeing the emergence of practices that focus on each individual learner to efficiently take advantage of educational resources and deliver better results, both at the individual level and in aggregate.

Examples of how data is being used to impact education on both a big scale and at a fine level of detail are both the teaching effectiveness initiative in New York and the Early Alert initiative in Santa Ana California.  Both are using detailed data to identify and improve practices that help students succeed.  Both are different and I expect we will learn a great deal from each. As the backbone to these initiatives, eScholar has a front row seat as progress is made and obstacles are overcome.  We look forward to sharing information that will help us all.

The next installment of this blog will look at the role that data and skill standards play in helping students achieve a better education.

This blog was created to share with readers our observations and insights into how data is being deployed, the outcomes achieved (both good and bad), and insights that may be helpful to others.  I know this conversation will benefit from different perspectives and I welcome your feedback.

Also, if you believe there are topics where our perspective on the exciting data work occurring across the country could be helpful, please feel free to ask.

Wishing us all success in the most important endeavor there is- education.

Shawn