The L.A. Times describes California's attempts to qualify for Race to the Top Funds both by changing state law to allow teacher- and student-level data to be connected (for teacher evaluations), and by laying plans for new databases. These would supposedly help address California's chronic education-data challenges. As the Times puts it:
California has long been awash in educational data. The state Department of Education alone has 125 separate databases, including those that track student test scores, national origin and school finances.But for all that data, the state cannot answer many basic questions about public education: Which high school classes are best at preparing students for success in college? Do the hundreds of millions of dollars spent annually on training actually make for better teachers? Which credentialing programs prepare the most effective educators?
This echoes what author RiShawn Biddle wrote last year in "Political Roadblocks to Quality Data: The Case of California," his contribution to Fordham's A Byte at the Apple: Rethinking Education Data for the Post-NCLB Era. But as he makes clear, creating successful systems requires political will and leadership, not just funding. After all, California has a "sprawl of K-12 and higher education agencies (each with their own systems, technologies, data sets, interpretations of student privacy laws, and procedures)", and someone needs to coordinate them.
Furthmore:
the cultural norm in California is that the state department of education does not collect data without a specific mandate and funding. And the part of the state constitution prohibiting "unfunded mandates," has meant that the California Department of Education must reimburse districts for the effort involved in submitting any data that are not strictly required in order to comply with state or federal law. Compounding this problem is a state department of finance and state legislature that are very aggressive about stopping the state from imposing costs on districts. This makes it extremely expensive for the state to collect the data it needs from districts, even though that very same data would be useful to districts.
So what's California to do? Biddle says emulate these three lessons from Florida:
1. Taking a broader view of data: While Florida's data system is designed to help districts and the state comply with federal and state regulations, it is also becoming more useful for all parties. Teachers will soon be able to access student-specific data on the Sunshine Connections portal and use tools that will help with designing instructional efforts. The development of a data warehouse... allows for researchers to conduct a wide range of longitudinal research.2. Incorporating districts in data system design: ... Florida has tailored its system so that all sides gain; the state can get the information it needs while the reporting burdens of districts are reduced (and districts get a wider range of data). In 1987, the state began replacing aggregate data collections with individualized student- and teacher-level data reporting...; this simplified district-level reporting while moving the more tedious job of aggregating data and generating reports to the state level.
3. Requiring the entire education sector to cooperate on data system integration: ..Leadership from governors as diverse as Lawton Chiles and Jeb Bush helped universities overcome their reluctance to share data. And universities in Florida have a lot to gain. Since education databases there have been linked to other state databases containing information about employment, universities can assess their own performance by tracking how graduates perform in the workforce after leaving college.
P.S.: To read about two other states that went about creating their data systems the right way, see Nancy Smith's discussion of Kansas and Virginia.
