School Districts and Open Data
The School District Data Deluge
School performance data directly affects the economy through home sales the vitality of a neighborhood community centered around a school.
Open data needs to start early as part of the class curriculum and be blended with STEM subjects. Students will need to understand data, how it is consumed and how it can be effectively produced and accessed.
Most school districts across North Carolina and elsewhere are still in the process of building their data system technology capacity. An examination of district and state level capacity with respect to data systems needs to take into account the multiple types of systems containing data concerning students and other aspects of the education system. Data is not just generated around student performance and accountability. Public safety, transportation, spending per capita on students, special needs programs, wellness data. This staggering list of data attributes creates something on a scale that requires a new approach.
Nearly all school districts have an electronic student information system providing real-time access to information such as enrollment and attendance.
So districts have spent a great deal of though and effort on collecting, aggregating and storing data on accountability and performance. Probably more so than most of types of government institutions.
The Problem is the data delivery systemsMost districts are looking for a way to effectively link their multiple data systems since there is no “single solution” data system and there is no simple recipe for effective system implementation or communication. Most districts have multiple, distinct data systems. Although not a problem in principle, the use of multiple systems can be a problem in practice. Municipalities have seen this happen as well and have started to build a data strategy centered around reducing complexity and making data more accessible to internal as well as external stake holders.
My only teaching experience has been as a graduate student teaching freshman college kids about 20 years ago. I worked as the web systems administrator for Durham Public Schools for 8 years. During that 8 years I have seen the community frustrated at the way accountability data is reported. Adequate Yearly Progress Reports (AYP) were (as of 2011) required by North Carolina and the NC Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI). Here is a typical AYP report from Durham Public Schools. This is what is reported to the NCDPI:
This is text on a page at http://www.dpsnc.net/ayp. The Communications Office does a great job at posting the content it gets from the Accountability Office and the Accountability Office wants that story to get out there.
This data is not reusable and is not in machine readable format. There is no CSV or any way to consume this data.
There is no context. It is not just the metadata that is missing from the data set, we have no idea of what the terms mean or what the target goals are. NCDPI rolls all of the data together to create the website http://ncreportcard.org. Digging through the http://ncreportcard.org site one can drill down and find content about each school in a district similar to this school here:
http://www.ncreportcard.org/src/servlet/srcICreatePDF?pSchCode=304&pLEACode=320&pYear=2011-2012
This will generate a single PDF on the performance of a single school. As parents and as citizens, we all want our schools to be successful and accountable with how they spend money. This data should be in machine readable format so site visitors can merge, compare and export data to analyze the context of the data presented on the website.
Cities such as Raleigh and Durham and counties such as Wake and Durham have started to explore how to make data more accessible to the general public. This is not a transparency issue as much as it is an issue around creating a narrative. These scores are rows of data with no real meaning. There is nothing to compare them to.
The NCDPI site (http://www.ncpublicschools.org/accountability/) does contain quite a bit of information. If we look at the amount of data produced by NCDPI it is a treasure trove of accountability. What is all of the data below were presented in dashboard and that dashboard was powered by APIs that could programmatically combine data sets together to create a visual data driven narrative of the state of our schools?
Possible SolutionsMost studies on data reporting by school districts center around student performance only and on the effect of accountability programs on teacher retention, student achievement and sometimes capital expenditure. Given that the accountability data sets have no "single solutions" one can conclude that efficiency data is also quite siloed and not factored in easily to create the institutional narrative mentioned above.
It is possible to make access to data easier through the adoption of open data, the conversion of compiled, proprietary data into machine readable data. This would allow a given district to create a web of linked data wrapped in a context of history and accompanied by rich sets of metadata that anyone could use a rubric.
Using an open data platform and a programmatic approach to data extraction, transformation and loading, a district and each school within could be more transparent and collaborate with the community to make data driven decisions.
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