Embracing the data monster: Four ways boards can use data to drive decisions
By:
Kristi Garrett
There comes a moment in board meetings and study sessions that may make trustees feel either ambivalence, apprehension or eager anticipation: The data analysts are up next on the agenda, complete with charts and spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations, ready to unleash a torrent of statistics for the board’s edification.
Understandably, a fair number of those elected to school governance from the lay citizenry seize up when confronted by the data monster—that mind-boggling morass of percentages and rankings meant to illuminate the path toward student proficiency.
Not every board member is or should be a statistician. But in an era of increasing accountability, how can boards become more effective by using data in their deliberations?
Some board members may be new to the concept of data-driven decision-making, but it’s become part of the culture for other districts. That’s especially so since the No Child Left Behind Act has dictated annual reports of student performance.
Using data is “endemic within our system. It’s how we do business and how we’ve done business for about 15 years,” says Mary Stanton, a member of the Long Beach Unified School District board of education. “Everything we do in relation to student performance and the performance of schools is driven by data.”
Long Beach has become known as an emissary of data-driven decision-making, being a five-time finalist and 2003 winner of the Broad Prize for Urban Education. This year, the nearly 90,000-student district is again up for the Broad Foundation’s top prize, which rewards urban districts that do the best job of closing achievement gaps while raising overall student performance.
Smaller districts, too, have realized the benefit of having a robust data collection and evaluation process. “If you don’t have data you can look at, I can’t even imagine making a decision,” says Stacie Morales, board president in the 3,400-student Empire Union School District in Modesto, an agricultural center in the Central Valley.
Empire’s larger neighbor to the south, the 73,000-student Fresno Unified School District, is also developing a reputation for skillful data use. “There’s nothing the board of education does without consulting data,” says board President Valerie Davis. In the last few years, under Superintendent Michael Hanson, she says, the district has begun crunching the numbers in just about every area: “Student performance—academically as well as their social and emotional status, how well they’re doing behavior-wise, expulsion—is all data-driven. Everything we do with our community, our constituent services, our parent-family survey, our superintendent task force—our data expert crunches all the numbers and shows us trends.”
Creating a data culture
Whether large or small, establishing a data-using culture is essential for any district, says Long Beach Superintendent Christopher Steinhauser. First, data will reveal the district’s strengths and weaknesses, he says, and second, having reliable data will help the district maximize its human and fiscal resources.
“Sometimes people just do the same thing they’ve always done, and they don’t know why they’re doing it and they don’t have any data to say it’s good or bad. But … data is impersonal, and it tells you the truth,” he says. “In our school system, you don’t have board members with single agendas. You really have a collective group of individuals who are looking at the system as a whole because they study the data.”
Jon Meyer, board president in Long Beach, says that having reliable data on which to base decisions has helped the board do a better job of fulfilling its responsibilities.
“We’re trying to see that each individual, regardless of where they are at the beginning of the course or the class, is making progress in learning,” he says. “Unless you’re data-driven, I think you’re operating in a fog.”
To demonstrate what some effective boards are doing, consider four areas where boards typically might use data in their governance role: student performance; communications; staffing; and budgeting.
1. STUDENT LEARNING AND ACHIEVEMENT
Long Beach trustees found it difficult to absorb the flood of data the staff was providing to update them on the district’s progress toward their academic goals.
“It was overwhelming,” Meyer recalls. The board asked for a “data dashboard” that would make key indicators easy to understand.
“We asked that [the data] be no less powerful,” Meyer adds, “but to simplify it and make it dramatic so we could immediately look at this dashboard like a pilot looking at the dashboard of an airplane and determine exactly where we were and if we were on target for student excellence, aiming toward the year 2013.”
Proficiency rates in math and language arts, progress toward graduation, college and career readiness and other indicators are graphed in easy-to-read, color-coded charts for each school and districtwide.
Fresno uses a similar dashboard concept to track progress, board president Davis says. “We have an ongoing, quarterly cycle-of-review process [that] looks at the entire organization,” down to graffiti cleanup and curb appeal at each school, she says.
Showing the entire staff how their actions impact everyone else in the learning environment, along with tracking trends in course enrollment, disciplinary action and other measures of student performance, is an important part of the culture of the district, she says.
Fresno’s review of the number of expulsions and suspensions in the district led the board to institute an anti-bullying program. Data about the students’ health and obesity prompted adoption of a wellness policy that replaced soda in vending machines with juice and water and banned candy sales during school hours.
In Modesto, for the past 12 years the Empire school district has added its own assessments to measure students’ grasp of the standards three to four times a year, depending on grade level.
“Instead of waiting for the state testing to come, we have been measuring [students] as they go along through the year” to identify problem areas while there’s still time to help the student catch up, board President Morales says.
Long Beach’s practice demonstrates the power of a robust local program for collecting and analyzing data. District analysts noticed that math proficiency rates dropped dramatically after their fifth-graders transitioned to sixth grade. Learning of the trend at one of the board’s tri-annual workshops, Meyer says the board directed the superintendent to investigate.
District staff crunched the numbers and discovered that only 20 percent of the curriculum in sixth grade consisted of new material. Based on that information, Superintendent Steinhauser redeployed about half of the district’s elementary math coaches to middle schools in a pilot program that now extends to seventh grade. Based on the success of that math pilot, Meyer says the board instituted a policy to mandate interventions after grades three, five and eight for students not at grade level.
Sharing progress toward district goals with the board throughout the year allows district staff to make midcourse corrections immediately, Steinhauser explains.
“It could be redeployment of human capital or fiscal capital,” he says. “It makes everything much easier and aligns everything within the system so we’re all talking the same language.”
2. COMMUNICATING WITH THE PUBLIC
There are times when boards need feedback from the community to make the most appropriate decision.
Empire’s Morales found that to be true when she and her colleagues noticed that each year a sizeable number of students was late returning from winter break. Many families visit relatives in Mexico at that time of year, and it was not their custom to have their children do independent study assignments if they would still be gone when school reconvened. Along with the academic concerns, the drop in attendance was costing the district a lot of money, Morales says.
Using an automated telephone survey system called Connect-Ed, the district polled parents and staff and learned that a three-week break was preferred by parents. The schedule was adjusted and now, far fewer students are absent following the winter break. Using a tool that allows for immediate feedback like Connect-Ed is invaluable, says Morales: “I can’t even imagine what we did without it.”
Long Beach offers personalized Web pages so parents can stay up-to-date about their student’s schedule, assignments and grades. The portal, called School Loop, came in handy recently after the board directed staff to get input from the public on budget priorities.
“We developed a budget survey and delivered it for the first time via the Internet,” Steinhauser explains. About 7,000 people responded to the survey in English, Spanish and Khmer via the Web, and an additional 3,000 completed paper surveys at community meetings.
“Those priorities were a great source of data as we … are going through cuts, because they had to give priorities by level as well as overall priorities for the school system,” he says. “It was a very inexpensive, very efficient way to get input.”
Another time it’s essential to seek public feedback and participation is when a district has a bond or parcel tax on the ballot.
Long Beach’s Measure K, a $1.2 billion bond that won 71.34 percent approval in November 2008, took months of planning. In preparation, hundreds of community members, parents, students, teachers and other district staff spent untold hours attending meetings and answering surveys, amassing a wealth of data that the district consulted in developing a facilities master plan that laid the foundation for the measure’s success.
It’s vital to work with community when trying to win approval of a bond, Meyer says.
“Our bond issue was passed by 71 percent when we only needed a two-thirds majority vote—that was overwhelming in these hard times,” he says. “But we did a lot of work with community outreach and community input and building everybody in as a partner in terms of what our school district really needs.”
Fellow board member Stanton agrees about the importance of public input.
“They’re our customers, so to speak,” she says. “We could not have done some of the things we’ve done over the years without extra help from the community. You need them walking right beside you, not behind you, but helping you.”
3. HUMAN RESOURCES
One of a board’s primary responsibilities is evaluating the superintendent. Many boards have found the process is easier when they have established specific, measurable goals that are appraised by examining data.
Steinhauser says his goals derive directly from the district’s Academic and Career Success Initiative, which includes 10 goals that cascade down to each district department and school site. For example, he says he considers what he needs to be doing as the superintendent to ensure the district reaches its 2013 goal of having 75 percent of eighth-graders score proficient or advanced on the Algebra 1 test.
As the data comes in for each of the district’s goals, Steinhauser says, “the data drives either a change in instructional practices, a change in deployment of resources, both human and fiscal, or a combination of all those things.”
This year, the data indicated that the district should redeploy its math and language arts coaches to the middle schools, he says, many of which have also gained a coach assigned specifically to help them achieve their goals through effective use of data.
Further, based on the district’s truancy data, 10 social workers were recently reassigned to a pilot program focusing on efforts to keep students in school and prevent dropouts. Over a three-month period, Steinhauser says, attendance among 60 percent of the kids targeted by the program improved drastically.
“These were kids who were missing anywhere from 50 to 80 days a school year,” he says. “We’re now going to take that pilot and expand it at the schools that, based on the data, have the biggest problem with truancy.”
4. BUDGET AND FINANCE
Five or six years ago, as the Empire school district began losing students to new subdivisions, Morales says tracking enrollment data became essential as the district attempted to anticipate changes in revenue. She recalls how difficult it was to explain to their teachers why they weren’t getting the same raises as their peers in growing districts nearby.
“When we first started declining enrollment, and literally no other school district [in the area] was having declining enrollment, you had to almost overwhelm them with information,” Morales says of the teachers. “We’re a service industry, so the bulk of our cost is going to be in employee costs. If you cannot show the public the data to back up your decision, you’re going to have a really hard time.”
In Fresno, the district uses data to evaluate which projects on its list of targeted improvements are working and which they no longer need, board President Davis says.
Teaching coaches, for example, may have to go back into the classroom or into a different area. Davis explains: “We might need a Hmong interpreter and not the Spanish one, or might need the Spanish one and not the Hmong one. We just move those resources [as] needed.”
Having the data to show why a program is no longer needed, or, conversely, why it’s a priority, is important if the public is to understand the board’s budgeting decisions.
Long Beach revisits its budget data each week, redeploying funds as needed, Steinhauser says, with the board kept informed regularly at workshops or by staff reports at board meetings.
“If the data says that in an area we had put $1 million we don’t need $1 million, we only need $200,000, then we redirect that funding based on another need in the system,” he says.
Getting comfortable using data
Long Beach board member Stanton agrees that, as lay persons, it’s normal to have some level of anxiety when confronting the data monster.
Developing trust between the board and district’s employees is the key, she says. “They have to trust that if they give you data you won’t use it in an incorrect way. It’s mainly building a relationship of trust within the whole organization. It’s something we’ve worked at. I feel we have it. I hope we do.”
Fresno’s Davis admits that her large, urban district is quite different than the tiny rural districts around them in the San Joaquin Valley. Still, she insists any district can benefit from skillful use of data.
Don’t stop at studying test scores, she urges.
“You have to look at the social and emotional needs [of your students] and the supports you have in place,” she says. “It’s not just about feeling good, feeling safe; you’ve got to provide the activities and the encouragement to be in the arts, athletics and music.
“What works for us has been very thoughtful, methodical and analytical, all at the same time. It really has. But because we keep our focus on what happens in the classroom, what it means to our children and their families—I think that’s the power of our success.”
Kristi Garrett (kgarrett@csba.org) is a staff writer for California Schools.
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