District Initiative

Drawing on lessons from the corporate arena, a school district in California consolidated and made accessible its trove of data well ahead of the curve.

By Rhea R. Borja

Poway, Calif.

Taking a page from the business world, a growing number of school districts are starting to use computerized tools for the analysis, management, and warehousing of data both to measure and improve student learning.

Much as their counterparts in retail and finance companies analyze quarterly revenue numbers, educators in those districts pore over results from state, district, and formative assessments, as well as demographic and other digitized data, to get a clearer picture of academic progress. The goal is to use the information to adjust classroom instruction and to allocate resources more effectively to bolster learning.

Consider the Poway Unified School District. Over the past few years, the 33,000-student district here in California’s northern San Diego County has put in place a customized Web-enabled data system, paired with a benchmark-assessment tool. It has enough bells and whistles to satisfy the number-crunchers in the central office, but is...