“Regional Data Initiative” continued from page 8
leaders and we set to work implementing systems, integrating data sets, and customizing reports. Our ISD partners organized professional development activities and sent out surveys and State Board Continuing Education Units (SB-CEUs) were issued. The collaborative effort was groundbreaking with reports filtering in of “ah-ha” moments and administrators saying, “I finally have the data I always needed!”
One particular story of an educator in Upper Peninsula touched me. When she heard her school was considering holding two of her former students back a grade, she used the regional data warehouse to confirm a hunch and uncover the truth about their faulty grades. The data revealed the students had passed every test, but failed to turn in their homework. That’s right, they were about to repeat an entire grade over homework. Confronted with the data, the school relented, promoted the boys, and reassessed the weighting of homework assignments, which in itself led to deeper conversations about proper assessments and grading.
Not everything has gone smoothly. In addition to having dedicated federal technology funding cut by two-thirds, making continued project funding perilous, we have run into what implementation experts call, “the dip,” where enthusiasm for the new project wanes at the same time obstacles start to look insurmountable. I started getting calls like, “we’re twelve months in and we still don’t have our PowerSchool data loaded.”
The last several months have been “gut-check time” for the project as they call it in sports – time to see if we have what it takes to stay the course and finish. Stories of success, like the one from the U.P, give us hope and assurance that we are on
the right course and the hard work is important. These stories help us make the numbers mean something. It also helps that we are taking steps to align our work with the Michigan School Improvement Framework and articulating a set of common expectations for what teachers can get from their data warehouse, whether they work in Menominee or Muskegon or Mt. Pleasant.
If you are employed by a school participating in the Regional Data Initiatives, you can help. It may be called by different names in your area of state, names like IGOR or IRIS. There’s Data Director, Pearson Inform, Class A, DataWise, and Pinnacle Analytics. Whatever flavor, we know one thing: if teachers and building administrators start asking what’s available right now, more will come. If one thing is true in education, especially educational technology, is that the more educators ask for something, the more schools are inclined to buy in. I know it doesn’t feel that way all the time, but asking works. Especially if you keep asking, and that’s essentially what the Regional Data Initiatives are all about, providing data to answer important questions about how all of us can improve teaching and learning for each and every one of our children.
Bruce Umpstead, State Director
Educational Technology and Data Coordination Office of Education Improvement and Innovation Michigan Department of Education
umpsteadb@michigan.gov
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