April 2008 — Features
Print this articleClick here to receive your FREE subscription to T.H.E. Journal
On the Road to DDDM
Implementing a data-driven decision-making initiative is a painstaking, six-stage process. Two districts are halfway home.
TWO SCHOOL DISTRICTS-Chicago
Public Schools (CPS) and Plano
Independent School District in
Texas-have undertaken ambitious initiatives in recent years to introduce
data-driven decision-making into their operations. Although
each has struggled with different obstacles, both have progressed
beyond the initial two stages on the DDDM continuum, where issues
of planning and funding are fleshed out and purposes are defined,
and now reside at the middle rungs, stages 3 and 4, where data is gathered,
organized, and interpreted.
In the case of CPS, getting the data into a condition where people would actually believe it-and rely on it-has required massive restructuring of the main applications upon which the district relies. Plano, on the other hand, began to spin its wheels in tool adoption: Should it go with systems that district people would be comfortable using, or should it make a leap of faith?
How the districts chose to resolve these issues would be
sure to go a long way toward determining in what shape and
with what degree of success they would move on to stages 5
and 6, where data begins to drive decision-making and the
outcomes of those decisions are judged.
CPS: Delayed by Definitions
Five years ago, Chicago Public Schools, the third-largest school district in the country with 426,000 students and 48,000 employees, began the arduous task of replacing a number of aged legacy systems. Student information, human resources, payroll-all critical systems-were, according to district CIO Bob Runcie, 30 to 40 years old.
Those applications, covering the workings of 600 schools, generated a tremendous amount of data, but doing analysis across data stores was difficult. It was all siloed. Only a handful of people were capable of maintaining the software, and a small proportion of potential users ever bothered accessing the programs. The programs' primary purpose was as a compliance vehicle-to collect just enough information to do the required reporting to the state and federal government. That meant that users maintained the data they cared about on individual PCs or ran "shadow" systems to generate the reports they needed for their own schools.
The time had come for upheaval. The opening shot was a new comprehensive student information management system that CPS called IMPACT (Instructional Management Program and Academic Communication Tool). It began with a simple premise: to make people confident that the information they were working with was consistent and reliable. Runcie explains that no data gathering can start until all sides abide by the same language. "Some schools, for example, have different definitions of perfect attendance," he says. "Some may include religious holidays. Some [may not]. And they may define tardy differently."
Until schools agree on what classifies a tardy or an absence, attendance statistics can't be compiled. It took CPS two to three months to decide on the definitions of just those two terms.
