Data and Accountability

A key component of the District’s Race to the Top plan is to improve data quality and access to data across the city. Access to high-quality data is fundamental to making informed decisions about how to turn around struggling schools, focusing teacher and leader professional development, and targeting resources to students. Race to the Top will work in conjunction with current efforts underway to develop and expand a statewide longitudinal data system; track students’ progress from pre-K through college and into careers; emphasize building data systems to help parents, teachers, schools, districts, and the District better measure our progress; pinpoint our resources; and hold ourselves accountable for results. Building on this initiative, our schools will develop high-quality systems that will provide teachers with usable data to implement real-time classroom decisions and improve classroom instruction. These systems will give schools the tools necessary to support teacher instruction, close achievement gaps, and foster continuous educational improvement among our students

Through Race to the Top, students, parents, school leaders, community members, and researchers will have accessible and understandable data, and our schools will have instructional improvement systems.  More transparent, accessible, and understandable data are essential to the needs of the District’s students, parents, education providers, researchers, community members, and decision-makers:

• OSSE will build an interactive web site that provides PARENTS and the PUBLIC with a roadmap to find useful data to understand and evaluate the progress our STUDENTS are making to be ready for college and careers.
• OSSE and LEAs will develop a common, city-wide measure of individual student growth, to provide useful information to TEACHERS and PARENTS and to help with teacher and leader evaluation systems.
• To encourage greater use of District data, OSSE will create research-ready data sets, an online data-request tool, and a list of educational research priorities for RESEARCHERS and the PUBLIC.

Renewed focus on using data to drive professional development and tailor instruction is a critical component to improving teacher development and increasing student achievement:

• Every school will have a data coach or analyst to help translate data for use at the school and classroom level to inform strategies and approaches to instruction design.
• LEAs commit to providing all teachers and school leaders with additional time to analyze the data to inform classroom practices and professional development necessary to foster a data-driven culture within schools.
• LEAs will be able to join together to build consortia to develop high-quality instructional improvement systems allowing access to 360-degree student, teacher, grade-level, and school data. These systems will result in timely, informed classroom decisions by teachers and administrators; improved instructional strategies; and ultimately, raise student achievement levels.
• These instructional improvement systems will create coherent, seamless data systems, permitting easier transfer of data within and across LEAs and improving access to accurate, timely, and usable data that fits the LEA’s needs and mission.