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Vision to Know and Do: Data Rich Districts: Models for Continuous Improvement School districts and school district consortia across the country have successfully transformed their organizations to support learning for all students and accountability to the entire community. Though these districts are diverse in size, geographical location and student demographics, they have moved a step ahead of NCLB requirements by integrating data reporting into a culture of continuous improvement. Districts with a culture of data-driven decision making did not begin by building a data warehouse, but through a strategic planning or visioning process. In embarking upon this process, the districts leadership avoided blame and burden, instead creating a culture of shared accountability. Everyone from the janitor to the school superintendent has clear responsibilities, measurable objectives, and performance indicators as well as the resources and decision-making power they need to meet their targets. Many districts borrowed systems or criteria developed for improving business practices and applied the techniques to educational organizations. In 2001, two school districts received the first Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Awards for performance excellence in education. The Baldridge Award process provides a framework for assessing and measuring performance indicators with regard to providing value and satisfaction to customers. The stories of these districts provide compelling examples of what can occur when educators use data effectively. Chugach School District: Rural Response to Local Expectations Name: Chugach School District Chugach School District in south central Alaska transformed their district from a failure to a success by engaging the community, asking fundamental questions, and using real data to understand where resources needed to go. In 1994, the district was failing by almost all measures: staff turnover exceeded 50%; students scored lowest in the state of Alaska on California Achievement Tests; business leaders complained that graduates lacked basic skills; and only one student in 26 years had gone on to college. "We were on a burning platform, getting miserable results," said Robert Crumley, Chugach School District Assistant Superintendent. The district covers 22,000 square miles along Prince William Sound and serves 214 students in three communities: Whittier, a former army base, and two Alaskan Native Communities, Chenega Bay and Tatitlek. Through a series of town hall meetings, the district determined that the traditional industrial model of education to prepare students for college was not relevant to their community. Students needed to prepare for five possible outcomes, equally weighted in importance: college enrollment, business entrepreneurship, full-time employment, military or service learning, or vocational training. The school board and district leaders proposed radical changes to suit the remote community's needs. The district eliminated grade levels as measures of progress and adopted a standards-based system with levels of mastery that emphasize real-life learning situations. The standards continuum extends from pre-kindergarten to the equivalent of grade 16 and students complete their education at their own pace, graduating at age 14 to 21. Each student has a learning plan based on their learning patterns and needs, and an assessment binder containing formal and informal results aligned to standards. Students must demonstrate proficiency in 10 areas of performance, including basic academic and career development skills as well as cultural awareness and character skills. Results have been dramatic on the California Achievement Test: reading scores rose from the 28th%ile in 1995 to the 71st in 1999; math scores increased from 54th to 78th; and in language arts from 26th to 72nd. Fourteen of 17 CSD graduates since 1994 are attending post-secondary institutions. The organization of the district changed as well. The district reduced the number of administrators to three and eliminated spending on packaged curricula in order to increase travel funding. Teachers spend more time together learning techniques, developing skills, and a "trickle charge team" of experienced educators visits sites to provide peer coaching and substitute teaching. Faculty turnover has dropped from over 50% to 12%. Recently, CSD led the formation of the Alaska Quality Schools Coalition and 12 districts are replicating their model. In addition, Crumley is developing the Aligned Information Management System (AIMS), a productivity model for educational institutions that includes leading indicators to measure leadership, staff focus, student focus, and process management. In 2001, the district was the smallest organization ever to receive the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Awards for performance excellence in education. Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence Framework 
(Source: Baldrige Education Criteria, baldrige.nist.gov/Education_Criteria.htm) Chugach Improvement Process
Pearl River School District: Students Choose Public Schools Name: Pearl River School District Pearl River School District (PRSD) in Rockland County, New York, also received the 2001 Baldrige Award. The district began their change process in 1992 with a new board of education and three strategic goals: improving academic performance, improving public perception, and maintaining fiscal stability and improving cost effectiveness. "As a community's largest public investment," said Sandra Cokeley Pedersen, Director Quality and Community Relations, "a school district has an obligation to keep the community informed about programs, funding, spending, decision making, and challenges." The district uses a plan-do-study-act process to improve performance. They start in July with the district mission, values and goals, and collect data throughout the year from student performance, environmental scanning, demographic and enrollment trends, student and stakeholder surveys, national standardized tests, state tests and learning standards, audits, and inspections. The district publishes a balanced scorecard to communicate district progress using leading and lagging indicators at the level of the school, grade, classroom, teacher, and student. The audience of the scorecard includes parents choosing between public and private school as well as senior citizens concerned about property values. The process revealed that 95% of children in the community go on to higher education, and perception of the school system is directly tied to their ability college preparation. Yet only 63% of students graduated in 1996 with a Regent's diploma (a higher standard in New York State than a regular diploma). The district set a goal that all students would graduate with a Regent's diploma. Teachers and counselors used 4th and 8th grade exams results to identify students who needed more support. They proudly post the number of their students who have passed the exam so that everyone works toward the goal. In 2001, 86% of students had achieved the Regent's diploma. The district also discovered a high attrition rate among top students after eighth grade. Six out of the top ten students left PRSD for private schools. Once the district knew what students they were losing and why, they took action to keep those students engaged. Now virtually all students continue in PRSD. The district uses a nationally recognized survey tool to measure value and satisfaction of students, parents, and faculty. The commercial survey tool gives them access to a comparative database to measure progress against indices and similar districts. Taxpayers have expressed their satisfaction by approving the district budget by a two to one majority in recent years. The results of eight years of continuous improvement are impressive:
Pedersen attributes the district's success to their formal process of continuous improvement. By adopting the Baldrige Model and conducting self-assessment, the whole organization knows what to expect and how to achieve it. PRSD Improvement Process
Community Consolidated School District 15: Integrated Planning Name: Community Consolidated School District 15 Located in Palatine, Illinois, in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, Community Consolidated School District 15 uses the Baldrige Award performance criteria as a framework for self-assessing organizational progress. The district serves 13,000 students with 14 elementary schools, three junior high schools, a K-8 school, a special education school, and a newcomer's school. In 1990, the CCSD 15 hired Bob Ewy as Director of Planning to make operational the strategic plan throughout the organization. The district always collected data, but now it is tied to organizational goals and available for decision makers. District 15 partnered with a corporate vendor to design an Educational Data Warehouse (EDW) to address data and information needs that support continuous improvement in student achievement. Through a discovery process, district staff identified 20 questions about student performance that the EDW should be able to answer. These questions became the focus of the data design and acquisition, guiding the development and deployment processes as well. The EDW enables district decision makers to access data instantly and securely via the Internet, scan existing reports, and employ easy-to-use tools to discover, analyze, and mine data themselves. The EDW is populated with carefully chosen and cleansed (validated) data from files (electronic and paper) that were once scattered throughout the district. Query software makes access possible to 349 different variables in the database. Data reports correlate attendance to achievement, track enrollment histories, disaggregate all test results by subgroup performance, report survey, and give this information in trend strings of at least three years. Data can be drilled from the district level to the school to the individual child. Individual child data can be grouped into cohorts, subgroups, or analyzed by applying a number of possible variables to get a true picture of performance over time. The district uses EDW to make program improvement decisions, for trend analysis, and to develop school improvement plans.
Each year, CCSD15 delivers a "Shareholder's Report" to every household in the community. In addition to measuring instructional effectiveness, this also includes satisfaction data about support services such as transportation, safety and food services. CCSD15 Improvement Process
Montgomery County School District: Daily Activities Tied to Vision Name: Montgomery County School District Located in one of the fastest growing areas in the country, Montgomery County School District (MCSD) in Rockville, Maryland, operates 191 schools. Like CCSD15, MCSD adopted the Baldrige model for continuous improvement and uses a business reporting format to communicate goals, progress, and expectations. The MCPS Strategic Plan offers a road map for where the school is going and how they are getting there. The data-driven decision making process started with the superintendent's vision for shared accountability and organizational improvement. Associate Superintendent and Chief Information Officer John Porter began implementing V.O.S.P.A., a strategic planning process he had developed in private industry. Although the district borrows from business models, the school environment differs significantly according to Porter. Decisions require the input and support of diverse constituents and each group will weigh in with an opinion, making consensus-building an essential and time consuming effort. The measures of success are less obvious in a classroom than in a business, but are essential to keeping all staff members on track. "We spend money on staff development," said Porter. "Is it making a difference? People feel good. But are we seeing a difference in the way they teach?" He believes that data systems can help answer that question. The Integrated Quality Management (IQM) System is the district's technology tool to facilitate data driven decisions using a data warehouse and Instructional Management System (IMS). Porter's team began developing requirements for a data warehouse in 2001. The system captures an array of data from different systems to provide a knowledge base for decisions. The data warehouse, the strategic system that houses historical data for trend analysis, becomes available to all schools in summer 2003. 
Roll-out of the IMS coincided with new standards-based curriculum in the elementary schools. Teachers now have electronic access to report cards, standardized assessment data, and new curriculum and instructional resources. Teachers use the system to locate instructional resources, analyze student performance data and develop a road map for teaching with individualized instruction. A cross-functional professional development team created an implementation plan to ensure alignment between district offices and schools as well as between the IMS and curriculum training. "We produced a user's manual geared to the many tasks frequently performed by principals so they did not have to learn a new technology system and make the link to their work," said John Burke, Director of the Division of Information Services. "The manual provided step-by-step instructions so principals could realize immediate benefits using the IMS." MCSD Improvement Process: VOSPA A Vision articulated by the superintendent and board with community buy-in. Poway Unified School District: Data to the Desktop Name: Poway Unified School District Poway Unified School District, a member of the Western States Benchmarking Consortium, realized that they were data-rich and information poor. The district has 31 schools and an enrollment of 32,754 students from the suburbs of San Diego, California. They started by bringing together disparate data sources including databases from transportation, human resources, student information systems, learning management systems, finance and special education departments. One of the first places they focused on delivering the information with clarity and meaning was the teacher's desktop. "When the API scores come out in California, there is a lot of pressure on teachers," said Tracy Jones, Data Systems Supervisor. "None of the teachers were interested in special programs, because they had to teach to the tests. We are trying to present and deliver data that is useful to a teacher as a guide for instruction. Not to tell teachers what to teach, but to help them make decisions about what and how to teach." In fall 2002, the district rolled out Total Information Management System (TIM). A teacher can log in to view a class and drill down to a student profile. The data warehouse pulls relevant data from the student information system, human resources, special education, student assessment, and delivers up-to-date, on-command information to the teacher. Teachers can filter by period, course or any of the NCLB filters such as ethnicity, gender, or second language learners to compare achievement and identify strengths and weaknesses. The profiles have current and historical data as well as contact information for the student, parents, and email links to other teachers. With this tool, teachers can begin to use data to drive instructional practices that was not possible in the past. Instructional Technology Specialist Stacey Campo trains teachers throughout the district to make effective use of this information and provides feedback to the data systems department. She focuses on creating a community of collaboration and support where teachers share strengths and weaknesses. She listens to them and helps them use the profiles to make their tasks easier. After working with elementary teachers, she suggested that the data systems department add a feature to display class information for export to make a parent contact list or do a mail merge. In her experience, elementary school teachers have a head start on how to use district and state assessment data to impact instructional practices. Most elementary teachers already use differentiated instruction, because they are responsible for all academic areas and student achievement. Traditionally, secondary teachers focus on a subject area and present information at a specified pace. It is up to the students to embrace the knowledge presented. However, with T.I.M., this focus is changing. For example, a high school teacher used the profile system to determine the reading level of the students in his science class. When he discovered that they read below the reading level of the text book he used, he adjusted his instructional materials accordingly. TIM is going help all teachers apply differentiated instruction to improve learning for all students. Poway Improvement Process
Panhandle Area Education Consortium: Teacher Learning Plans Created in 1967 to support rural school districts in the northwest region of Florida, the Panhandle Area Education Consortium offers a professional development course in data-driven decision making to administrators and instructors in 20 Region I school districts. The consortium leverages resources across districts to deliver training and support. Because teachers rarely receive instruction in data-driven decision making during pre-service, they need to learn analysis techniques to make use of it. The trainers begin by helping teachers see their role in education as supporting students on an education continuum rather than covering a set of standards. They learn the difference between summative data-a snapshot in time, and formative data-periodic assessment throughout the year. Because districts use different data management software tools, the trainers focus on the basics of using data with simple productivity tools such as Microsoft Excel. In addition to the class, the program models data-driven decision making by applying it to professional development. Teachers create an individualized learning plan based on self-assessment and comparative data. The principal signs off on the individual plan and PAEC helps to deliver necessary training. Many of the members of PAEC also belong to the Gateway Student System Consortium (GSS) (not affiliated with the computer company), created to provide student information data warehousing services and assist small districts with state and local reporting. This home grown system is staffed by 4 system analysts who support the 16 member districts. The GSS's first priority is to provide the highest quality data to the state to help districts claim their state funding. Next, they provide attendance, assessment, grade reporting and many other school related functions to help districts run their school systems. Finally, they look for opportunities to provide "value-added" services including flowing data in certain formats or linked in a particular way to selected downstream products or applications for local management and reporting purposes. Profiles of Progress From a small and geographical dispersed district in Alaska to a large suburban school system, these district profiles demonstrate that data-driven decision making can be a powerful tool for continuous improvement and for changing student outcomes, classroom practices, professional development, administrative spending, community support, and student enrollment. Data-driven decision making gives everyone responsibilities and rationale for change.
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