School & District Management

Project Eyes Diverse Data Sets for Insight On Children

By Debra Viadero — October 03, 2006 4 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

Researchers who study children and schooling are often constrained by the data sets they use. School district data, for instance, yield valuable information on students’ ages, their achievement history, and their educational placements, but they don’t tell the whole story.

District data systems typically won’t reveal, for example, whether children are homeless or living in a foster home. They won’t disclose if children have been exposed to lead paint or whether their mothers dropped out of school. For those kinds of data, researchers usually have to turn to different databases from different agencies.

Researcher John W. Fantuzzo, shown with a colleague in his University of Pennsylvania office, helps run a comprehensive database on Philadelphia's children.

Now, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, working with the city of Philadelphia, have found a way to integrate all of that information into a single archive. Known as the Kids Integrated Data System, or KIDS, the archive is thought to be the first of its kind.

The KIDS archive merges data from seven city agencies and the school district of Philadelphia, providing access to all the data the city collects on its youngest residents. The hope is that the project, besides making researchers’ jobs easier, will generate information to help agencies improve services for children.

“This is about the kids and the people working directly with kids,” said John W. Fantuzzo, an education professor at the university’s graduate school of education and a project leader. “We know university researchers aren’t all Mother Teresa or Albert Schweitzer. We have to prove we can produce practical knowledge, too.”

The project stems in part from work that Mr. Fantuzzo began in the mid-1990s to gather data from different city agencies on a cohort of 19,000 children entering 1st grade in the city schools.

“It generated good news and bad news,” Mr. Fantuzzo said of the study. “The good news was that people who never really worked together actually got together and learned about different systems, and were able to do it in a successful way.”

The bad news, he said, was that the findings revealed disturbingly high rates of mortality, homelessness, abuse, and other risks among Philadelphia’s children.

Building on that initial effort, Mr. Fantuzzo and two of his university colleagues—Dennis P. Culhane, a professor of social policy, and Trevor R. Hadley, a professor of psychology in psychiatry—decided to build a permanent integrated data system. Work began in 1999 with $800,000 from the Philadelphia-based William Penn Foundation, and proceeded from there in fits and starts.

Low Trust at First

Besides developing new technology, the professors had to persuade skeptical city officials and negotiate a complex web of federal and state laws designed to protect children’s privacy. “There’s a big risk for the city,” said Ronnie L. Bloom, the foundation’s program director for children, youth, and families funding. “A lot of times cities don’t want to be examined all that closely.”

Agencies also balked because they felt they had been burned by researchers who did what Mr. Fantuzzo calls “drive by” studies.

“Researchers would come and would want to get data from us,” said Annabella Roig, the deputy director for the city’s division of social services. “They would find out that the city of Philadelphia is not serving its children in some way, and they would publish it and we would hear about it and get upset. There was low trust.”

The University of Pennsylvania researchers allayed the agencies’ concerns by creating a forum for scholars and agency officials to meet quarterly to bounce ideas off one another and approve and vet research projects and findings. While city officials cannot censor findings, they can veto research proposals they feel won’t prove useful to their agencies.

“Researchers have to agree to be part of a pretty extensive vetting system because that’s the only way there’s going to be change,” Mr. Fantuzzo said.

The arrangement doesn’t mean, as some critics have suggested, that the researchers aren’t “holding city agencies feet to the fire,” Ms. Roig says. “We’re not afraid of bad news. We just don’t want to hear about it post hoc.”

Privacy a Concern

To satisfy federal privacy-protection laws, three administrators at the university’s Cartographic Modeling Lab “scrub” the data from city agencies to remove personally identifiable information. Then they use an algorithm created by the researchers to assign identifier numbers to children so that records can be matched across agencies.

University of Pennsylvania researcher John W. Fantuzzo helps lead the project gathering academic, health, and other data on Philadelphia children.

Through the lab, statistics are also merged with geographic data to provide a more complete picture of the social environment in which children are raised, Mr. Culhane said.

The system is already yielding useful findings, according to its developers. Mr. Fantuzzo’s ongoing work with entering students, for instance, has found that the risks children bring with them to school—such as poverty, having a poorly educated mother, lead exposure, or inadequate prenatal care—are all linked to academic and behavioral problems later on. More important, the study also found that attending a formal, center-based child-care program can “protect” children from those adverse outcomes.

The findings, which Mr. Fantuzzo has presented to principals and early-childhood educators across the district, helped the city obtain funds to add another 1,000 seats to its district-operated Head Start programs this fall.

Mr. Hadley has found that parents with mental-health problems who enroll in treatment programs were less likely to lose custody of their children than similar groups of nonparticipating adults. Now, he’s studying autistic children progressing through the system of public services. “We’re finding out what they’re really getting and from whom,” he said, “and that’s something that we’ve never been able to do before.”

Coverage of education research is supported in part by a grant from the Spencer Foundation.
A version of this article appeared in the October 04, 2006 edition of Education Week as Project Eyes Diverse Data Sets for Insight on Children

Events

This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
Sponsor
Reading & Literacy Webinar
The Future of the Science of Reading
Join us for a discussion on the future of the Science of Reading and how to support every student’s path to literacy.
Content provided by HMH
Mathematics K-12 Essentials Forum Helping Students Succeed in Math
Student Well-Being Live Online Discussion A Seat at the Table: The Power of Emotion Regulation to Drive K-12 Academic Performance and Wellbeing
Wish you could handle emotions better? Learn practical strategies with researcher Marc Brackett and host Peter DeWitt.

EdWeek Top School Jobs

Teacher Jobs
Search over ten thousand teaching jobs nationwide — elementary, middle, high school and more.
View Jobs
Principal Jobs
Find hundreds of jobs for principals, assistant principals, and other school leadership roles.
View Jobs
Administrator Jobs
Over a thousand district-level jobs: superintendents, directors, more.
View Jobs
Support Staff Jobs
Search thousands of jobs, from paraprofessionals to counselors and more.
View Jobs

Read Next

School & District Management Q&A ‘A Nice and Gentle Disrupter’: Meet the New Principals of the Year
The award went to middle school principal Damon Lewis and high school principal Tony Cattani.
11 min read
Damon Lewis, the principal of Ponus Ridge STEAM Academy, and Tony Cattani, the principal of Lenape High School, receive their awards at the annual National Association of Secondary School Principals Illuminate Principal of the Year Celebration in Seattle.
From left, Damon Lewis, the principal of Ponus Ridge STEAM Academy, and Tony Cattani, the principal of Lenape High School, receive their awards at the National Association of Secondary School Principals conference in Seattle. They were both named the 2025-26 National Principal of the Year.
Courtesy of Allyssa Hynes/National Association of Secondary School Principals
School & District Management Opinion Kindergartners Are Struggling With Self-Regulation. How Principals Can Respond
This school leader recommends three actionable steps.
Ian Knox
4 min read
Addressing difficulties and equipping students, staff, and faculty with the tools they need to thrive.
Vanessa Solis/Education Week via Canva
School & District Management Opinion The Stunning Resignation of UVA President Jim Ryan—and Why It Matters
The university president’s departure is more than just a headline. It’s a lesson in leadership.
2 min read
Opinion Licensed Not for Reuse Wait What FCG
Canva
School & District Management In Their Own Words This Custodian Got Students to Stop Vandalizing and Take Pride in Their School
Andy Markus, the 2025 Education Support Professional of the Year, helped boost behavior and engagement in his Utah district.
5 min read
Andy Markus, the head custodian at Draper Park Middle School, in Draper, Utah, sits for a portrait during the National Education Association's 2025 Representative Assembly in Portland, Ore., on July 3, 2025. Markus was named the 2025 NEA Education Support Professional (ESP) of the Year.
Andy Markus, the head custodian at Draper Park Middle School, in Draper, Utah, sits for a portrait during the National Education Association's 2025 representative assembly in Portland, Ore., on July 3, 2025. Markus was named the 2025 NEA Education Support Professional of the Year for his mentorship of students.
Kaylee Domzalski/Education Week