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June 15, 2002
The Administrator's Guide to Data-Driven Decision Making (cont'd)
STEP 2 Standardize data management
Once you've completed your information inventory, you'll need to implement any necessary changes and upgrades to your existing systems. Using the following series of practical steps, you'll be able to fix any problems identified in your current information system before adopting a more complex storage or analysis solution.
Develop data standards that apply to the whole organization
Some basic standards include eliminating paper systems; entering all data directly into compatible computer systems and across networks; and organizing data sets with universal keys.
For example, after discovering that professional development data was being kept in an insecure and incompatible spreadsheet format, we implemented policies and procedures that would eliminate multiple, parallel data entry (see "Streamlining Your Data Collection").
Data-driven decision making is all about correlating data elements and exploring those factors that contribute both positively and negatively to student and teacher performance.
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Assign ownership for each data element
Identify specific staff members who are responsible to enter and maintain each piece of information you intend to collect. For example, the school nurse should be responsible for collecting and maintaining the immunization records of each student, while the librarian should make certain that the records of book circulation are accurate and timely. A clear chain of accountability, with appropriate checks, will result in greater data quality.
Get data in the right hands
Data must be available to the decision makers, whether they are in the classroom or the superintendent's office. Both teachers and administrators need access to better, more frequently updated data about their students' and staff's performance so they can quickly make appropriate adjustments. This can be accomplished by selecting information systems that have multiple interfaces for different users. For example, teachers should have online access to one slice of the data relating to their students, while parents would see information pertaining only to their child, and administrators would have an unlimited district- or school-wide view.
Replace and upgrade systems where necessary
Your first option should be to maximize existing information systems, but when that's not possible, explain your needs to a vendor of information management services to see what they can provide. Select flexible services that can adapt to your changing needs for data collection, management, and analysis. Specifically, look for information systems that allow you to add fields and screens without compromising your ability to integrate new features that emerge in product upgrades. My district, for example, would have benefited from an HR information system that let us create custom fields for our professional development records for teachers. This would have helped us avoid the multiple entries that occurred when our users created parallel systems to hold data for which there were no fields in our HRIS. Ultimately, due to the problems we discovered in our information inventory, we decided to replace all of our transactional databases with information systems that provided the flexibility we needed.
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