July 2005 — SETDA
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Using Data Systems to Meet AYP: Vermont
Data: The Great Uniter
Vermont educators come together to build a data warehouse that helps improve schools and student learning throughout the state.
While we have a vast amount of educational data in Vermont, it is often difficult to gain knowledge, much less wisdom, from all of the different sources and formats of data. Vermont has been conducting student assessments in math and literacy since 1997, collecting student demographic information and assigning unique student identifiers. And since the inception of the state assessment, educational leaders have been asking how best to use the data to improve student achievement.
During the 2002-2003 school year, local district leaders came together to look at tools that would empower educators to use the data to improve education. We discovered that what Vermont needed was a data warehouse with analysis tools to make it easy for a user to ask ad hoc questions of the data.
Supporting Data-Driven Decision-Making
In the summer and fall of 2003, 20 supervisory unions came together to form the Vermont Data Consortium (VDC; www.vermontdata.org). The common goal of the consortium was to deliver district-wide educational information, data analysis tools, and training for data-driven decision-making. A secondary goal of the consortium was to develop a network of professionals who were committed to that decision-making.
As we were about to start construction of our own data warehouse in November 2003, the commissioner of education proposed that the Vermont Department of Education (VTD'E) should form a partnership with the consortium to develop tools that would support the needs of both organizations. A formal partnership was established, and together we created a project team to lead the development and implementation of the data warehouse and the associated analysis tools.
Determining warehouse requirements. During 2004, the project team conducted a needs assessment to determine what was required to support data-driven decision-making in both organizations. The major requirements for the data warehouse were:
- An off-the-shelf data warehouse with a flexible data model that would allow for the safe addition of objects, attributes, and reports. By safe, we mean that our modifications would maintain their integrity through software revisions and upgrades.
- A well-designed metadata utility that would support a flexible data model with the ability to link to Vermont-specific data sets.
- A user-friendly, feature-rich, graphical user interface (GUI) reporting and analysis tool that would allow all levels of educational users to access data through a rich predefined report suite, as well as support ad hoc queries to the data.
- Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF) compliance for all applications.
- A train-the-trainer professional development program for VTD'E and VDC staff on technical aspects of using and managing the data warehouse to ensure long-term self-sufficiency in administering the warehouse, and a professional development program on how to use data to improve education.
Putting Vendors to the Test
The needs assessment formed the basis for a request for proposal (RFP). Seven companies responded to the RFP, and proposals were evaluated by a team that had six members from the VTD'E and six members from the VDC. This team included IT personnel from the state department and the field, a curriculum director, a school principal, and a teacher. The proposals were scored in the following areas:
