Schools: invest in you data and information team

Every school, or network, or district wants a “data-driven culture.”¹ A quick search can produce a long list of blog posts and articles loaded with great advice about how to tackle the problem of being “data-rich but information-poor,” or how to “create a culture of effective data use.” Naturally, the vast majority of these articles focus on assessment data and what educators can do to inform high-quality instructional strategies.

Most articles on this topic overlook a critical point: teachers and their culture are probably not the most impenetrable barriers to establishing an effective data culture. Further, teacher analysis of student-level data (although obviously a crucial function) is not the only lever to increasing student achievement that needs measurement and data analysis. Approaching the conversation this way puts yet another burden on the plate of already overtaxed and overworked teachers. It also neglects the need for the school to invest appropriately in the policies, systems, and tools for teachers, instructional coaches, principals, operational leaders, and boards to extract information and value from the school’s data and improve learning outcomes.

Schools must invest in three critical areas to establish the environment where a data-driven culture can thrive: physical capital, human capital, and policies and practices that create systems to effectively turn data into information and knowledge. Ignoring these essential faculties can leave school leaders with the impression that a few professional development sessions can shift the culture of data—and that recipe is destined to fail.

Here’s my look at how schools can create an environment where a the right people, practices, and investments can make the space for a data and information culture to thrive and push student achievement. 

Physical capital, digital capital, and data infrastructure

Schools generate huge amounts of data every day. Attendance, assessment scores, enrollment information, financial information – it accumulates quickly. Schools should make their data easy to access and analyze by investing in platforms and templates that minimize duplicated work while producing accurate results.

Using the right tools makes routine analyses more insightful and sporadic analyses less of a burden. The spreadsheet is a common go-to tool for analysis. But unless users are enshrining their routine procedures in basic scripts, overuse of spreadsheets can introduce delays and errors – both of which contribute to frustration. Here are some tips.

• For the simplest routine procedures, it may suffice to use spreadsheets or workbooks with templates or embedded scripts that run analyses and check for errors automatically. Make sure your templates have embedded data validation to minimize data entry mistakes. And design them with ease of use in mind so users can get the information they need quickly.
• For those looking to level up, use analytic tools and develop procedures that automatically extract the relevant data from the school’s data platforms (e.g., the student information system that stores attendance, demographic, and score data or the platform that holds financial data) and runs it through the desired analysis. Be sure to format the results in a format that is easy to digest. 
• To move past spreadsheets and scripts, consider documenting analysis procedures in a coding language like Python or R, or using a statistical computing package. Documenting analysis procedures in code makes them reproducible at the push of a button. Routinizing these tasks means basic procedures can handle greater depth more easily. Using code to document the sporadic or less frequent procedures removes the burden of having to start from scratch at each iteration – saving time, frustration, and unnecessary burnout.

Human capital

To enter the realm of elite data crunchers, a school will need to invest in the specialized knowledge of a data and information team. It has been my experience that schools are readily able to find data analysts who know a little about education or educators who know a little about data analysis and information building. But linking those skills in a single team seems elusive.

So schools need to build data and information teams imbued with the skills and knowledge to meet the challenge. This investment depends on the size of the school and the volume of data it is pushing around. As the size increases, so does the complexity. This list describes the roles an elite data and information team would need to fill. Depending on the size and complexity of the school, network, or district, some combination of these roles and individual positions will do the job.

This list begins with roles that operate nearest the raw data and moves to the roles that operate nearest the resulting information.

• Data maintenance: A person or team who ensures data entry is error-free and data are stored in the right place and format. They generally ensure the data are available, clean, and fully ready for analysis. These individuals don’t need to know a lot about education, but they do need to know about the school’s technical systems and data platforms.
• Data analysis: Get people on your team who can write code. There are lots of available, low- or no-cost data analysis packages out there. Even the free options make routine analyses reproducible and provide huge value in time savings. Reproducible code also provides greater depth of analysis at a lower cost. (I will write more about the need for schools to go deeper on their analyses to boost student achievement in another post.) Analysts will need statistical skills and knowledge about the types of questions educators will want to ask of their data. They will need to be able to handle sticky coding problems and have enough foundational knowledge to know if the analytic techniques they are using are appropriate for their data and the question being asked of it.
• Data translators: These folks turn the analysis results into information and feed it into a decision process. They deal in metrics and measures, sure. But they also deal in context, trends, and historical knowledge. They turn standalone numbers, measures, and visual data displays into recommendations and strategy to drive high-quality instructions and interventions.
• Decision makers: These folks may not be part of the data team explicitly, but they are the consumers of the data team’s products. They use information to evaluate situations, provide answers to questions (or their best estimates thereto), gauge risk and uncertainty, and, ultimately, make decisions. They marry information about past events with their understanding of current status to make predictions and forecasts about the future. They evaluate and think strategically. Although these leaders may not appear on the organizational chart as part of the data team, they must consider themselves as part of the data team because they are the data team’s target audience.
  
  Depending on the context of the question being asked or the problem seeking a solution, these people can be teachers, coaches, instructional, operational, or cultural leaders, principals, C-suite level directors, and board members. At this level, everyone is part of the data team.

Policies and practices: how to invest

• Know your capacity and expand your point of view. Establish a data and information team and view it as one that serves the whole school organization rather than just one part of it. The focus of these conversations is usually on how teachers analyze student data. This is obviously super important, but the whole school will benefit if the data and information team services the whole ship. New insights will emerge.
• Think strategically. Professionally develop leaders and teachers to understand what data are available and how they can ask clear, concise questions of it and interact with it. Address things like data efficacy and the timing of when new data and information become available. Precise planning can be a foundation for efficiency. The more you can plan ahead for the types of questions you will ask and when you will ask them, the better off the organization will be. Of course, emergencies happen, and sometimes we need answers to questions right away. Invest in everything you can to maximize the former and minimize the latter.
• Budget appropriately. Data and information generation is a complicated and complex topic. Everyone recognizes that in words, but few schools invest appropriately in action. Spreadsheets can handle some of the quick turnaround, short-term analysis that some team members need to do. Anything beyond that is going to require more robust tools and knowledge. The right tools in the hands of a robust data and information team will support strategic thinking and decision making from the board, to the leaders, to the teachers, and results will appear in student achievement – where it matters most.

¹ For ease of reading, I will use the term “schools” to refer to a school, a network of schools, or a school district.