BUSINESS

In K-12 schools, business intelligence leaves no child behind

July 18, 2007

Five years ago, the U.S. government enacted the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. Proficiency standards, mandatory testing, and achievement gaps have been top of mind for school districts ever since.

"Parents, educators, and lawmakers have placed a high degree of scrutiny on student, teacher, and school performance," says Phil Hopkins, executive director of information technology at Pasadena Unified School District.

"They want to know the results of individual students and they want to know why those results were achieved."

A broad array of challenges

NCLB presents educators with a complex challenge: First, improve students' reading and math scores. This means making tough decisions. Within New York city's public school system, for example, the district is prepared to change leadership or even close schools in cases of severe performance problems.¹

Administrators within the New York City school system are prepared to change leadership or close schools in cases of severe performance problems.

Educators are also expected to better understand performance within their student bodies, across schools, and districts, and over time. This means cleaning up their data and using it more effectively.

In Lafourche Parish, Louisiana, for example, middle schools supervisor Chris Bowman analyzes reports to understand the root causes of disciplinary problems and the way schools deal with them. In essence, he says, the "key to better behavior may be in better data." ²

Turning to business intelligence to meet and manage them

Many school districts are turning to business intelligence to meet these challenges. Not only does BI provide the information to support tough decisions. It provides a way for educators to optimize and leverage their data to improve outcomes.

In Pasadena county for example, a BI deployment from Cognos, an IBM company, lets school administrators, teachers, and parents access and analyze class performance. The solution draws information on a dizzying array of fields, including student demographics, HR, facilities, finance, student attendance, grading, even food services.

Now, Pasadena can access reliable data for rigorous analysis and use the resulting insights to track and manage budgets, monitor student performance, and address complex issues. For example: measuring the effects of lunch programs on student performance.

Reporting requirements & better data management

Schools must also provide annual assessments and performance measurements, align with state standards, and disseminate results quickly. And they have to report this information in several ways: by gender, English proficiency, immigration status, racial and ethnic group, disability, and economic status.

Schools have a choice: risk reporting errors with spreadsheets and manual data entry, or use BI to automate data collection and reporting.

To meet this challenge schools have a choice: risk reporting errors with spreadsheets and manual data entry, or deploy BI to automate data collection and reporting, like they do at Everett Public Schools.

Each month, Everett provides State officials with detailed analysis reports for each student, ranging from academic performance to grants eligibility and special education requirements.

Using Cognos BI, school officials can develop and customize up-to-the-minute student information reports. These are shared and validated across all schools for data consistency and accuracy.

"To ensure that each student learns to high standards in a caring atmosphere, we needed a system in place where we could easily and securely share student information with all of the schools under our jurisdiction and, together, identify where we are successful, and where we are not meeting the needs of our students," says Newel S. Rice, operations and development manager at Everett Public Schools.

A "whole new light" on education

"Our schools can now quite easily take a very broad look at many aspects of their student data and then drill into the details at the click of a mouse."

The system presents information in a whole new light for Everett school district. "Our schools can now quite easily take a very broad look at many aspects of their student data – including program and grant data such as free and reduced lunch status, English as a Second Language, and Title I – and then drill into the details at the click of a mouse," says Newel Rice.

"Administrators and their support staff have a much more thorough understanding of their student data, empowering them to confidently make more informed decisions."

He adds that IT staff continue to develop analyses and reports that provide insight into things like HR demographics, budgets, and standardized assessments. The new catchphrase for data analysis these days: "Let's cube it up and take a look." ³

Taking BI beyond NCLB

Beyond NCLB, educators and administrators are also looking at achievement initiatives of a different sort.

The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, and the American Comptetitiveness Initiative will call on schools to improve their performance to meet the challenges of the 21^st century.

For example: the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce has released a blueprint on rethinking education to prepare students for the global economy.

Among other things, they'll need more science, innovative skills, mathematics, design, and foreign language ability.

Can public schools make the shift? "The Skills commission will argue that it's possible only if we add new depth and rigor to our curriculum and standardized exams, redeploy the dollars we spend on education, reshape the teaching force and reorganize who runs the schools," says Time magazine.⁴

In a similar vein, President Bush announced the "American Competitiveness Initiative" in 2006. It would train 70,000 high-school teachers to teach advanced pupils in math and science – so students could better compete on the world stage.⁵

Schools will need insight into student abilities, programs, budgets, and skill sets, so they can better determine where they are and where they need to be, and re-tool their institutions for the future.

In these cases, schools will need insight into student abilities, programs, budgets, and skill sets, so they can better determine where they are and where they need to be, and re-tool their institutions for the future.

In short, they will need the same BI capabilities that are helping them meet the challenges of NCLB.

Summary

To improve outcomes, schools need insight into critical data. How are students performing? How do results compare over time? Which programs work and which ones don't?

Pencils, paper, and spreadsheets can't provide the answers reliably or fast enough. But business intelligence can. As some school districts have already discovered, it's critical in ensuring classrooms continue to make the grade.