April 2008 — Features
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On the Road to DDDM
Stage 3: Collect and sort.
THE DATA IS TRACKED DOWN AND ITS QUALITY EVALUATED. THE TOOLS AND APPLICATIONS PARTICIPANTS WILL USE TO WORK WITH THE DATA ARE DECIDED UPON.
He says another CompStat is scheduled for the spring to find out what activities those school principals have put in place in response to the initial meeting. Eventually, Chicago's elementary and middle school principals will go through the same exercise. Runcie says the CompStat sessions are vital: "We need to be able to provide a tool that people rely on and say, 'Hey, these are the data points I know I'm going to have to move on because they're going to help drive performance.'"
As CPS tries to push on to Stage 4 on the DDDM continuum, the decisions it has made in Stage 3 on how best to collect the data are already bearing benefits. Reliance on the new systems is growing, driven by a new district policy that prohibits the use of any alternative system that maintains information comparable to what's tracked by IMPACT. Albeit with some resistance, the policy, established in 2004, has caused data usage to soar. Whereas formerly between 2,500 and 3,000 users accessed data through the legacy software, with the introduction of the new enterprise systems, that number has expanded to more than 30,000 users, mostly teachers, with all of the access occurring through web-based tools.
Plano ISD: Moving Forward Fast
A little more than three years ago, Plano Independent School District, serving 52,000 students, decided it needed to get more out of student assessment beyond the reporting it was used to. At the time, the district was using an application from D2 Data Driven Software (formerly EdSoft). It was at a crossroads: Should it renew the license it had for the software, or was it time to move the district's decisionmaking to the next level?
As Plano's Jim Hirsch describes, the software would allow users to take data from a variety of sources, create a report, and deliver it online to the teachers to use for creating action plans for their students. "In reality, it was a very static report," says Hirsch, associate superintendent for academic and technology services. "It didn't combine more interesting variables in ways that truly were actionable. It was more of an autopsy piece."
