April 2008 — Features
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On the Road to DDDM
Stage 4: Extract meaning.
PARTICIPANTS GET ACCESS TO THE DATA AND LEARN HOW TO INTERPRET IT.
Decision-making was still an intuitive endeavor because the data frequently wasn't timely, and Plano teachers and principals didn't necessarily know how to analyze it. The district had no way to massage the information it was collecting without creating a new report. In fact, when teachers would go into the system, they would have to poke through 650 individual reports.
So Hirsch pulled together a group of about 70 people-members of his staff, teachers, principals-to help assess alternatives. For the next year, they discussed, as he puts it, "what experience we wanted to have happen in our classrooms." It quickly became apparent that the questions they wanted answered by the data were most critical. Hirsch offers an example: "I have a huge range of abilities in my classroom, but I don't know for certain which students need which type of assistance to get to the level of proficiency that they are going to be tested on this spring."
During that year's time, Hirsch's group met with about 10 vendors in the education assessment space, including some they'd worked with before, such as D2 and Excelsior Software. They were, summarizes Hirsch, "very nice-looking, web-based products, but they were just wrapping on an old thought process."
Hirsch read up on the concept of performance management, in which an organization sets predetermined goals, then monitors progress toward them in a systematic way. "It really began to make sense to me," he says. "That's exactly what we were trying to get into our school district." His team was skeptical that a product outside of education could supply what they were looking for, but Hirsch turned their attention to considering some of the leading vendors in the business intelligence arena.
Stage 5: Take action.
NOW THAT THE DATA IS UNDERSTOOD, OFFICIALS NEED TO DETERMINE WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT.
Meanwhile, SAS, a business intelligence software and services provider, was looking for some innovation in K-12, and, says Hirsch, "We were a school district looking for a vendor that was thinking differently from the others."
Ultimately, SAS beat out the traditional education products because Hirsch's team realized that the analysis of student performance encompassed more than the results of student testing. It also involved asking questions that entailed working with data from the financial and HR sides. Because SAS' software modules aren't limited to student assessment-and, in fact, need to be programmed to work with it specifically-the district can integrate data from these other areas in order to derive new insights, such as what sort of impact teacher credentials and training experience have on learning in the classroom, or what impact salary has on teacher retention.
