Schools putting data on Web

Data collection and analysis isn't the stuff of best-sellers, but what Salt Lake City School District is doing may come close.

Sometime this month, teachers and school officials will have access to more student and school data than ever, just by clicking a mouse.

Down the road, parents may have the same opportunity via the World Wide Web, mainly to track their child's academic records throughout the student's life with the district.

"It's just an incredibly thoughtful approach to the organization and distribution of data," said Superintendent McKell Withers.

What district officials hope is that with more information available at a quicker rate, adjustments in teaching and intervention programs will come sooner than too late.

Assistant superintendent Charles Hausman has spent the past two years swimming in data. He gets excited by things like this:

A fourth-grade teacher wants to know how well an incoming class is doing in math. The teacher pulls up third-grade math test scores and sees, for example, that geometry and fractions are no problem, but that computation scores are way down. The computation scores are then broken down to see that subtraction and problem-solving are the weak spots. The teacher adjusts.

Teachers in Salt Lake City will soon be able to more quickly combine that data with other relevant information to help improve a child's education.

For example, hundreds of after-school and evening intervention programs are now tracked at each of Salt Lake City's 34 schools.

Then add in all the data currently floating around the district, including things like test scores, survey answers, attendance records, parent income level — literally a sea of details all presented in tables, charts and graphs.

Educators and administrators — as in most districts — can get to all that data now, some parts not as easily as others.

At a cost of about $50,000 a year, a Web-based system called Scholar Suite will help change that, at least for tracking assessment data in Salt Lake City.

Teachers will have instant access to testing data, which they can combine with other variables, like the performance of a particular intervention program, to more accurately pinpoint trouble spots in a child's education.

Of course, a lot of that data collection and analysis is nothing new to most districts.

Other districts take advantage of some form of computer software to help them look at how schools are doing on standardized tests. And districts like Provo already use Scholar Suite, developed by Scholar Inc., for assessment data and analysis.