Smarter Data Systems: The New York City Experience
Part VIII of the Five Principles for Smarter Data Systems series–a guest post from Arthur VanderVeen, Chief of Innovation, New York City Department of Education:
… it is astoundingly difficult to impact day-to-day classroom practices. And unless we design data systems with a primary goal of improving classroom teaching and learning, our investments will show little return.
This closing thought expressed in the Five Design Principles for Smarter Data Systems appropriately reminds us that unless we impact the instructional core that is at the heart of teaching learning we will never realize the benefits of our investments in instructional data systems.
In 2007 New York City launched an ambitious effort to develop an instructional data system, the Achievement Reporting and Innovation System (ARIS), that integrates annual state test data with daily attendance, course grades, district interim assessments, past transcripts, credit accumulation, ELL status, IEP status, biographical data, and contact information–all into a single dashboard that gives every teacher and administrator in the city a comprehensive and real-time view of his or her students’ current and past achievement data.
The system includes a data analytics package that enables teachers and administrators to slice and dice the data in dozens of ways. Schools can identify students who are struggling as measured by any of these measures and target data-informed strategies and interventions to meet their needs. The system is now being extended to include tools to enable teachers to add classroom grades and quizzes and other local data that schools want to add to their profile of students’ performance and learning needs (e.g., behavioral incidents, club or sports participation).
An extension of the system, ARIS Parent Link, makes all of this same data available to parents, and teachers are now beginning to conduct parent-teacher conferences around a substantive discussion of each child’s current achievements and challenges.
Getting the right data to teachers and administrators as soon as it’s available is itself a real challenge–ARIS integrates data from nearly a dozen source systems, both internal and external to the NYC DOE. But the real challenge is helping