Last week I had the pleasure of attending the annual Strategic Data Project convening in Boston. The Strategic Data Project (or SDP) is an organization I helped to found almost twenty years ago with the goal of transforming the analytic capacity and data leadership of school districts, institutions of higher education, states, and non-profits in the education sector. So far, SDP has trained over 600 data fellows and worked with over 300 agencies and organizations across the country. The annual convening is one of my favorite events each year, a chance to interact with several hundred dedicated data analysts and leaders dedicated to creating tools and providing new, actionable information that directly impacts the work of agencies and non-profits working to improve outcomes for students.
Each year at the convening, SDP gives The Strategic Data Impact Award to an agency using data and analysis in a novel or impactful manner to improve outcomes for students. This year the award went to Southern California locals Shannon Coulter and a team at the San Diego County Office of Education (SDCOE) for their development of the Improving Chronic Absenteeism Network (ICAN).
The ICAN network connects a select group of schools working to reduce absenteeism – a challenge we have talked about here before. The SDCOE team provides participating schools both real-time, operational data designed to support action on the part of schools and expert support to work with schools in switching from an emphasis on compliance (e.g., “Why wasn’t your child at school today?”) to one of support and care (e.g., “We missed Morgan today…”). Overall, the program has students coming two to four additional days per year when compared to “business as usual”. I am not going to go into more detail about the program (you can read more, and watch a video about the program, here), but a few larger learnings jump out about using data and evidence as we do the hard work of improving schools.
Focusing on and tracking the right data is critical. Absenteeism may seem like an easy variable to track, but I have seen many different approaches in districts across the country. Is a child “present” if they show up for any part of the day? One period? Afterschool sports? Also, some systems default to a student being present – meaning that schools with poor record keeping have inflated attendance rates. (Note – this latter is not a big problem in California, where funding is tied to attendance and thus the state keeps a close eye on attendance records).
Likewise, it was critical for the ICAN team to make it easy for participants to collect intervention data – what was tried, when, and did it work?
Data must be presented in the right time frame and in the right way to be usable. We have lamented before about the utter lack of clear use cases for the California’s school dashboard. The San Diego team took a different approach – focusing on what information participants needed to know and to track and, for a time, manually tracking that data. Only then did the team move to creating dashboards with tight connections to the management needs and questions of users.
Data alone does not connect students to school (or do anything). It may seem obvious that data alone does not change the delivery of schooling, but I have had conversations suggesting that we just need to give school leaders data and information about “what works” to solve their problems. Schooling and program implementation is much more complicated than that, and one of the strengths of ICAN is that it provided rich support to schools to leverage school context and staff creativity and create joy in building connections and improving outcomes.
The work of improvement is generally hard, slow, and frustratingly incremental. The ICAN program sounds like a lot of work – and it has not eliminated the problem of absenteeism. So why do it?
Well, I would suggest that school improvement is generally the result of multiple changes that, over time, improve how schools work as organizations and communities. However, here is where data comes back into play. If organizations make shifts without then tracking related changes in outcomes, they will not be able to slot their wins and stop their ineffectual programs. The result will be ongoing initiative build up and churn. As academics and evaluators, staff at the EdPolicy Hub have many thoughts on how to best evaluate what is working – but none of it can be done without data.
It is great to see such thoughtful data and program work going on in Southern California. Congratulations to Coulter and the San Diego team.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of any affiliated institutions or organizations.