Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announced a technology-related white paper on Eduwonk today.
First, I'd like to share some thoughts about the first reader response there by Dr. Sherman Dorn. His argument is that the big state warehouses may offer you lots of data, but that data isn't always clean and the state systems aren't always flexible enough to serve teachers well. He argues (correctly) that timely, formative data is what teachers can really find valuable. The part that I think he could be more nuanced in his thinking relates to what he calls "local formative assessment systems" and whether or not they'd play well with a state system. Again, Dr. Dorn is right in that that'd probably be hard-- but the stuff I wish he'd thought about are local district-level (sometimes regional level) data warehouses.
Jeff Wayman at The University of Texas has done a lot of publishing about these systems and they mean for teachers-- I've been fortunate enough to also be his co-author on some of this stuff. While Dr. Dorn argues that "fitting everything under one roof" is hard, I think Dr. Wayman and I show pretty well how much better life can be for teachers when they have a district-level data warehouse. We also offer recommendations for how to make the technical and organizational work "less hard." If you've read this far, you probably know that data warehouses
(like Schoolnet) tie together all sorts of student data from all sorts
of disparate technologies. One way for these various systems play or talk to each other by being SIF compliant. What teachers see on their end is a unified system that allows them query for group dynamics across various factors (state and local tests, demographics, etc.), as well as drill-down for individual student needs to their hearts' content.
Using these systems, teachers report that they see more of the "whole student," are better able to respond to individual needs, and are better able to pick up where others have left off (which is great if you have high student mobility with the district). An added bonus, good policies for the local systems means cleaner data. Plus teachers have reported developing a common language and collaborating better. Certainly, Dr. Dorn is correct that you don't want data use to overburden teachers, and that doing lots of data entry is nonsensical-- but the research I'm familiar with shows that data warehouses can actually ease a teacher's day.
Finally, if the "one roof" is the district-level, what you can get is a data system that's build around local control and ideas about teaching and learning. All those local assessments, state assessments, and other programmatic data start making sense with each other in a timely, informative way. Funding these systems is worth the cost of all the days and hours of lost instruction that would happen without them.