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Voices in Urban Education
Archives
Smart Districts
VUE Number 5, Fall 2004
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
EXCERPT:
Working toward a Data-Driven,
People-Centered District
By Frank Till
Superintendent of Broward County (Florida) Schools
> Complete bio
Districts have the capability of tracking detailed data on individual students and schools. We need to use this capability to ensure that our district and all of our schools are succeeding for all of our students.
We have fully entered the electronic age, with multiple cell phones in most households connecting everyone to everyone else all the time; Internet-ready computers that connect adults and children to the world; and cable-ready television sets capable of pulling in over a hundred channels and satellite stations from every continent on earth. It is an entirely different world from the one in which many of our teachers and school administrators grew up.
Compare the current CSI: Crime Scene Investigation television series to the old Dragnet. Both shows are about police and crime solving. But the similarities between the two programs stop there. Dragnet's Sergeant Friday employed his “Just the facts, ma'am” interrogation technique to wrap up cases and throw the bad guys in jail. These methods may have been effective for his time, but the modern criminals portrayed on CSI are more sophisticated and require more sophisticated techniques. So the CSI crime-solvers rely on the use of data and scientific evidence.
Today in education, just as in police work, we are under pressure to produce ever-greater results with tight budgets. Like the investigators in CSI, we can only do our jobs effectively if we employ the electronic-age tools at our disposal, rather than relying on the methods that may have served the “Superintendent Fridays” well.We have the capability of tracking detailed data on individual students and schools.We need to use this capability to ensure that our district and all of our schools are succeeding for all of our students.
New Ways of Gathering and Using Data
Broward County Public Schools has begun to take advantage of the datarich environment in which all of us live. Situated in South Florida, between Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties, Broward County encompasses one of the most culturally rich areas of the United States. Our students come from 159 countries and speak fifty-two native languages. According to a survey conducted two years ago, seven of every ten new students in our system are foreign-born.
With 278,000 students, Broward County Public Schools is the secondlargest public school system in the state and the fifth largest in the country. Our annual budget is close to $4 billion, but, like most school districts, we struggle to make ends meet. Every day, to make sure we use our funds wisely, our system employs data to monitor our student transportation bus fleet, manage a $1.7-billion construction program, and track a multibillion-dollar investment portfolio. All of this monitoring, managing, and tracking require data to be available to us on a minute-by-minute basis. In the end, the students of Broward County benefit.
To help us collect and analyze data, we turned to the private sector, where data use is more routine than it is in education. Working with the IBM Corporation, we developed the nation's first education data warehouse, which includes a wealth of easily accessible information on student and school performance such as grades, test scores, attendance records, and special needs.
Archives
Smart Districts
VUE Number 5, Fall 2004
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
EXCERPT:Working toward a Data-Driven,
People-Centered District
By Frank Till
Superintendent of Broward County (Florida) Schools
> Complete bio
Districts have the capability of tracking detailed data on individual students and schools. We need to use this capability to ensure that our district and all of our schools are succeeding for all of our students.
We have fully entered the electronic age, with multiple cell phones in most households connecting everyone to everyone else all the time; Internet-ready computers that connect adults and children to the world; and cable-ready television sets capable of pulling in over a hundred channels and satellite stations from every continent on earth. It is an entirely different world from the one in which many of our teachers and school administrators grew up.
Compare the current CSI: Crime Scene Investigation television series to the old Dragnet. Both shows are about police and crime solving. But the similarities between the two programs stop there. Dragnet's Sergeant Friday employed his “Just the facts, ma'am” interrogation technique to wrap up cases and throw the bad guys in jail. These methods may have been effective for his time, but the modern criminals portrayed on CSI are more sophisticated and require more sophisticated techniques. So the CSI crime-solvers rely on the use of data and scientific evidence.
Today in education, just as in police work, we are under pressure to produce ever-greater results with tight budgets. Like the investigators in CSI, we can only do our jobs effectively if we employ the electronic-age tools at our disposal, rather than relying on the methods that may have served the “Superintendent Fridays” well.We have the capability of tracking detailed data on individual students and schools.We need to use this capability to ensure that our district and all of our schools are succeeding for all of our students.
New Ways of Gathering and Using Data
Broward County Public Schools has begun to take advantage of the datarich environment in which all of us live. Situated in South Florida, between Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties, Broward County encompasses one of the most culturally rich areas of the United States. Our students come from 159 countries and speak fifty-two native languages. According to a survey conducted two years ago, seven of every ten new students in our system are foreign-born.
With 278,000 students, Broward County Public Schools is the secondlargest public school system in the state and the fifth largest in the country. Our annual budget is close to $4 billion, but, like most school districts, we struggle to make ends meet. Every day, to make sure we use our funds wisely, our system employs data to monitor our student transportation bus fleet, manage a $1.7-billion construction program, and track a multibillion-dollar investment portfolio. All of this monitoring, managing, and tracking require data to be available to us on a minute-by-minute basis. In the end, the students of Broward County benefit.
To help us collect and analyze data, we turned to the private sector, where data use is more routine than it is in education. Working with the IBM Corporation, we developed the nation's first education data warehouse, which includes a wealth of easily accessible information on student and school performance such as grades, test scores, attendance records, and special needs.
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