You may have heard the word “steward” as related to the land and our environment. To “steward” is to take care of, to nurture. Being a data steward at OSSE is not a job title; it is a responsibility to take care of OSSE data. Because OSSE data, as we’ve said in previous blog entries, is more than data – it represents important information about people, whether a child, student, parent/guardian or faculty or a staff member of a school or child development facility.

Whether you are an OSSE staff member responsible for a single data asset or a data user accessing our datasets for research, data stewardship is just one important aspect of everyone’s responsibility to protect and care for the data.

At OSSE, our data governance structures and data stewardship practices work in tandem to maintain a delicate balance between increased demand for and availability of high-quality education data and the legal and ethical requirements to preserve individual privacy.

While individual states have the latitude to create their own data policies and implement procedures that meet the needs of their unique educational landscape, data governance is the common thread. OSSE works in community with other state education agencies (SEAs) across the country to share ideas and strengthen our data privacy and data governance practice.

Data governance is the approach OSSE takes to make decisions about and formalize data policies and processes that span the full life cycle of data, from collection to access and use, and from storage and secure sharing to disposal. Data governance ensures that all the District’s education data are managed and used in accordance with our data policies and through shared, strategic, and consistent data practices across the agency.

OSSE regularly convenes a Data Governance Committee (DGC), which is a formal group comprising appointed representatives from all OSSE divisions. In consultation with the OSSE Leadership Team, the DGC sets the data policy and determines data processes for the agency. The DGC also reviews the performance of the data stewardship program.

Data stewardship is the method by which OSSE ensures we are implementing our data policies and processes with fidelity. This includes consistently, efficiently, and effectively managing our data, making it available to stakeholders, and using it to its full capacity. Data stewards are the individuals who know the data best; they have decision-making authority over a data asset and serve as the primary caretakers of our data. While a business data steward is the programmatic expert of a data asset, a technical data steward is responsible for the operational management of a data asset.

OSSE uses a Stewardship by Asset model (Figure 1). In this model, the data asset is at the heart of our data governance program and stewardship practices. Each data asset has a single business data steward and a single technical data steward assigned. Individual stewards are typically part of a team, and those teams comprise our agency’s 12 divisions.

Data governance at OSSE relies on having a strong community of data stewards who diligently implement our data policies and care for the data flowing through every division in our agency. The stewardship of data by this community is vital to maintaining student privacy and improving quality and confidence in OSSE data, which leads to improved data-driven decision-making to support children, students, and educators, and creating a lasting and positive impact on the people and communities we serve.

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For more about data privacy, see previous Data Discovery posts about FERPA.