Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 4, No. 4 | The Impact of Data on Education, page 2

Florida
Panama City, Florida, is located in the state’s panhandle, far removed from the glamour of South Beach and the life-size mice at Disneyworld. Known for its white sand beaches and the emerald hues of its Gulf Coast waters, Panama City is a popular vacation destination that is equidistant—in miles and in spirit—from New Orleans to the west and Orlando to the east.

Panama City is located in Bay County, which is home to 26,500 public school children. That number, which has dropped slightly due to ripple effects from Hurricane Katrina, is one of many that Technology and Information Services Director David Smith watches very closely.

“We look at that every week. We run reports that tell everybody what our demographics look like. We do it by school, by grade level, by student population. I send it to these guys every Thursday,” he said, referring to four other people who were seated around a meeting table at the district’s administrative building in Panama City.

Those four people are in charge of curriculum and instruction for Bay County schools. And those four, Smith said, “are asking me questions now that they wouldn’t have thought of asking five, six, ten years ago,” probably because they have a combination of information and technology that allows them to keep much closer tabs on what is working and what is not.

“We’re looking at things now that we’ve never looked at before,” said Lendy Willis, Executive Director of Curriculum and Instructional Services for the Bay County school district. One example, he said, is a recent study of two different math programs used in the district, one from Harcourt and the other from Saxon Publishers.

“We got data today,” he said, “that compares last year’s math scores to this year’s math scores and tells us which series they’re using, so we can begin to look at where we are getting the bang for our buck with purchasing curriculum materials.”

Based on a preliminary review of the results there was no rhyme or reason, Willis said, as to why one grade did better with Saxon and another did better with Harcourt. It would seem, he said, that in this case it simply depended on the teacher, not the program itself.

Smith has also devised a way of electronically red-flagging potential problems for principals. It’s called the Principals’ Dashboard, and it provides a detailed snapshot of student performance on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT). If, for example, there are ten students in grade nine who scored at the lowest level, all the principal has to do is click on that number, and it gives him or her the list of students in that group. In addition, Smith said, the system highlights in red any data that is out of kilter.

The idea is similar to one developed by school officials four years ago to flag potential dropouts. That program looks at 17 different indicators, including test data, attendance and disciplinary actions. If any three of the 17 indicators are “turned on,” meaning they reach a certain, unacceptable threshold, then teachers know the student is in trouble and needs additional help.

In short, the district is doing everything it possibly can with the information at hand. “We assign reading coaches according to data,” Willis said. “We assign mentors for teachers, financial resources—I mean everything—according to what the data is telling us about schools and kids.”

Some of what is being done on the data front in Bay County schools is the result of local innovations—the Principals’ Dashboard, for example, and the at-risk indicators. But the data collection mindset in Bay County has its roots in Tallahassee, where state education officials started putting one of the nation’s most sophisticated data collection systems in place long
before anyone else.

Florida is the one place, above all others, where data collection has become the norm. It is the only state that has completed all ten essential elements required by the Data Quality Campaign. And it started in the 1980s, when pen and paper—not automation—were still being used to record information.

“We produced the paper forms,” said Lavan Dukes, Director of Education Information and Accountability Services for the Florida Department of Education. “We mailed the paper forms to school districts, they hand-entered the stuff, sent it back to us, we key-entered the stuff and then produced summary reports.”

As is commonly the case, much of the data—whether it related to vocational ed, special ed or English language learners—was being collected separately in what are commonly known as “silos.”

Early on, Dukes and his colleagues wondered “if we could find a better way to build this mousetrap.” Policymakers also determined that the state needed to keep better track of its students, and to do that they needed to have individually identifiable data for each one. By the early 1990s, they had decided that state funds would be contingent on each school submitting the required information.

“All of the systems that we have,” said Jay Pfeiffer, Deputy Commissioner, Division of Accountability, Research and Measurement at the Florida Department of Education, “basically began around funding issues.”

Before the systems were put in place, however, Dukes and his colleagues conducted a thorough review of the information that was being collected, of the overlap that existed, and how they could get everyone on the same page.

The next step was to centralize the collection process, Dukes said, and that wasn’t always easy. Not everyone was willing to relinquish control over their slice of the data pie. In fact, it took several years to accomplish, but it ultimately led to a culture of trust that has been crucial to the success of Florida’s data collection process ever since.

To get where it is today, Florida addressed two other controversial issues early on, and their experience with both has helped create a solid foundation for the quality of data the state now has.

One deals with the use of Social Security numbers in the student and teacher identification process. While the Social Security number is not part of the ID itself, it is part of the information collected for teachers and students, and certain “crosswalk” technologies can be used to access it. In recent years, the use of Social Security numbers has become controversial and most states are not using them. But their embedded existence in Florida’s data allows the state to cross-reference individual student and teacher information with college enrollment and employment data.

“If a student leaves high school and goes into the labor force,” Pfeiffer said, “we know about that. If they go into postsecondary, we know about that.”

The other potential landmine is privacy. Florida goes to great lengths to preserve the privacy of individual students and teachers. “That’s why there are no issues,” Duke said. “We are not babes in the woods when it comes to FERPA (the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act).”

All of these measures have had a positive effect. So much so that in Florida, Dukes said, most people no longer question the education data because they know that it’s collected consistently and reliably “across years and across programs.”

Next page: The vast majority of students at Ware Elementary School in Fort Riley, Kansas, are different from those at most other elementary schools in one tragically fundamental way.

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