States have made steady advances in building data systems that can track the progress of individual students from preschool through college and into the work force. But most states are not yet using that information to guide policies on improving education, according to a report on a national survey released on Friday.
The report is from the Data Quality Campaign, an effort begun in 2005 through the efforts of 10 education groups to press states to collect and use information on student performance. The campaign says states are largely succeeding in gathering the data: Forty-six states have put in place at least eight of the 10 benchmarks the organization has set for such systems. Those standards include the ability to match individual teachers with individual students' classroom performance and to follow students from the elementary and secondary systems into college.
The most progress in tracking student achievement, the survey found, has been made in the Southeast, where eight states have put all 10 of the campaign's standards in place.
But having data doesn't help if states aren't sharing the information with decision makers and using it to drive their policies, the campaign says, and that is where states continue to fall short.
For example, only nine states share reports on individual students with their teachers, the survey found, and no state yet has policies to train teachers in how to access, analyze, and use the data on student achievement to improve their work in the classroom.
The report says now is the ideal time to move forward with recommendations to use the information to improve student learning because that is one of the four requirements of receiving billions of dollars in federal stimulus money through the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund.
The report, "States' Actions to Leverage Data to Improve Student Success," will be available on the campaign's Web site.
Comments
1. fordhamref - January 29, 2010 at 07:51 am
Last fall, the Center on Law and Information Policy at Fordham University School of Law issued a study "Children's Education Records and Privacy: A Study of Elementary and Secondary School State Reporting Systems" () that surveyed all fifty states and found the state educational databases across the country ignore key privacy protections for the nation's K-12 children. The Study found that large amounts of personally identifiable data and sensitive personal information about children are stored by the state departments of education in electronic warehouses or for the states by third party vendors. These data warehouses typically lack adequate privacy protections, such as clear access and use restrictions and data retention policies, are often not compliant with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, and leave K-12 children unprotected from data misuse, improper data release, and data breaches. The Study provided the following recommendations for best practices and legislative reform to address these privacy problems:
1) Data at the state level should be anonymized through the use of dual database
architectures;
2) Third party processors of educational records should have comprehensive agreements
that explicitly address privacy obligations;
3) The collection of information by the state should be minimized and specifically tied to
an articulated audit or evaluation purpose;
4) Clear data retention policies should be instituted and made mandatory;
5) Access and permissible use policies should be well articulated and specific in nature;
6) Audit logs of access to and use of the state databases should be maintained as a guard
against unauthorized data processing;
7) Information about the database, its security, and its use should be readily available
and verifiable.
8) States should have a Chief Privacy Officer in the department of education who
assures that privacy protections are implemented for any educational record database and
who publicly reports privacy impact assessments for database programs, proposals, and
vendor contracts.