Alabama State Department of Education builds a performance management platform

Smarter Education: using data to assess the performance of educational initiatives

Instrumented: Academic, disciplinary and attendance data is collected by teachers at 1,400 schools, transmitted nightly to ALSDE’s central system and imported into the business analytics solution.

Interconnected: Analysts at ALSDE can view online dashboards to assess trends in more than 150 key performance indicators. They can also seamlessly generate reports for internal or external audiences.

Intelligent: Combining insight into school performance with an accurate view of the cost of different programs will enable ALSDE to prioritize programs and allocate budget more effectively, improving educational standards while delivering ever-better value for taxpayers’ money.

The Alabama State Department of Education (ALSDE) is responsible for educational, financial and administrative strategy and oversight for the state’s 132 school districts. The Alabama school system as a whole comprises approximately 1,400 schools from pre-kindergarten up to high-school level, and supports nearly 745,000 students. It also supports special education for gifted children and those with disabilities, and career/technical education for adults. The department has its headquarters in Montgomery, AL, and employs approximately 300 people.

ALSDE receives funding from the US federal government, and must comply with legislation such as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. The act stipulates that all government-run schools across the state must administer an annual standardized test, which all students must sit under the same conditions. These test scores are used to assess each school’s performance and trigger remedial action where necessary.

A need for better external reporting

“As part of the No Child Left Behind Act, we are required to provide a detailed annual report on academic results in our schools,” says Dr. Tommy Bice, State Superintendant of Education at Alabama State Department of Education. “Each year it was a major undertaking to gather all the information from 1,400 schools and then analyze and format it for submission to the federal government.

“There was always a concern that if paperwork went astray or errors were made in a spreadsheet, we would have to spend many hours checking and rechecking to make sure we got the right answers. As a result, one of our top priorities was to improve data quality and make it easier to obtain a single, reliable version of the truth.”

The potential to transform educational performance management

As the department began looking for ways to simplify its internal and external reporting processes, it realized that a centralized business analytics platform offered a huge opportunity not only to meet its immediate goals, but also to transform the way educational performance is managed and funded across the state.

“Broadly speaking, we use two main systems to manage Alabama’s schools,” explains Dr. Bice. “The first is the student records system, which schools use to manage operational data – test scores and other academic data, disciplinary data, student attendance and so on. The second is our financial system, which manages the budgets for all the schools, initiatives and programs across the state. We realized that if we could match up the data from these two systems, we would be able to assess individual programs in terms of academic performance against financial cost. This would help us prioritize and allocate our resources in a more intelligent way, ensuring that we get the greatest educational value from a limited budget.”

A true partnership with IBM

Building a platform that could deliver on these goals was both a technical and organizational challenge. ALSDE decided to enlist the help of IBM.

“We had to build consensus within our organization that analytics would be the best answer to the challenges that we were facing – that it wasn’t about taking work away from the IT department, but about using the skills and talents of our team for more valuable tasks than just collecting data and crunching numbers,” says Dr. Bice.

“IBM helped us not only design a solution, but also understand why it was the right direction for us to go. Ultimately, if we can free up the people in our organization and give them time to spend on innovative analyses that show us how to improve the quality of education across the state, then that’s much more valuable.

“We have an exceptional relationship with the IBM team,” he adds. “They aren’t just suppliers, they’re true partners for our organization. Although the solution utilizes IBM software, I have never once thought of this as a software purchase or a business deal. As we continue to work with IBM, the focus isn’t on tools or technical capabilities, it’s on helping us guide the evolution of education in Alabama.”

Integrating technology and operations

The solution is based on IBM’s education performance management solution, which is powered by IBM Cognos Business Intelligence software. This is integrated with the state’s student records system. The data is automatically analyzed by the Cognos software and presented in a number of web dashboards and standard reports that give ALSDE’s decision-makers an instant overview of trends and patterns in the school system’s key performance metrics.

However, as Dr. Bice points out, the software is not the whole story. ALSDE has also made some important organizational changes that play an important role in its ability to harness analytics effectively.

“We originally planned to have one analytics specialist in each department who would work on the reports, but IBM helped us see the advantages of a more centralized approach. So we are moving all the departmental reporting people into a single ‘research and development’ team, which will act as a center of competence for analytics. This way they can pool their resources and share knowledge, so we’ll be able to harness the capabilities of the platform much more effectively.”

Educating the educators

IBM Services has provided extensive training for ALSDE’s analysts, helping them get up to speed quickly and take ownership of the solution. ALSDE utilized a blended learning approach, taking advantage of IBM’s private and public training offerings in addition to web-based training. Additionally, the IBM team initially worked side by side with ALSDE staff over each phase of the project, handing over the work gradually as the in-house team’s competence levels increased. Now, the ALSDE team is almost completely self-sufficient in terms of the day-to-day management of the solution.

On an on-going basis, IBM also provides a project manager who works closely with ALSDE’s management team to ensure that the project plan is an accurate representation of the required tasks and associated time-lines to deliver the project. From a delivery point of view, IBM provided two resources to help implement the solution, including: the design and implementation of the data warehouse, ETL (data management) jobs, defining the metadata layer in Framework Manager, building cubes, delivering reports, and tailoring a mentoring capacity to ensure that ALSDE’s resources will be able to take full ownership of the analytics environment.

From an advisory point of view, IBM provides the insight and expertise to help ALSDE staff understand the full potential of the analytics platform, and to recommend processes and technologies that will help enhance the environment in the future.

Faster, more reliable reporting

The main aim of the first phase of the project was to provide a single, reliable source of data for external reports, and streamline the reporting process to make it faster and less labor-intensive. This objective has been achieved with flying colors.

“Taking the No Child Left Behind report as an example – it used to take us a long time to put together manually; the new solution can do it significantly more quickly,” comments Dom Martel, Program Manager at ALSDE. “Even more important than the labor saving is the fact that we can be much more confident in the accuracy of the data, which makes it easier to meet our reporting responsibilities.”

Enhanced visibility of educational performance

The second phase, which is nearly complete, has introduced a range of dashboards and reports for ALSDE’s managers, enabling them to view and assess educational performance metrics and make better, faster decisions when they spot a downward trend in academic standards, attendance or discipline within an individual school or district.

“We used to have bits and pieces of information about what was happening in our schools, but it was almost impossible to get the kind of comprehensive picture that provides an effective guide for action,” says Dr. Bice. “Now we’re much closer to where we need to be, and as we move through further phases of the project, we’ll continue to gain new, deeper insights.”

Integrating financial management

Phase three will see the integration of financial data into the solution, which is where ALSDE anticipates the most important long-term benefits of the solution.

Dr. Bice concludes: “Once we can match the educational success of a school, program or initiative to its budget and expenditures, we will gain a true understanding of the most efficient ways to boost academic performance in Alabama’s schools. This will transform our ability to deliver the best possible education to students within a realistic and sustainable budget.”

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