Jersey
struggles with school data
State cannot decipher vast
trove
Tuesday, February 07, 2006 • BY JOHN MOONEY •
Star-Ledger Staff
New Jersey public education was on full
display last week with the release of the annual School
Report Card and its hundreds of thousands of numbers, from
test scores for each building to the amount of money spent
on cafeteria food.
But when it comes to tracking how schools
do over time, or how children progress, say, from preschool
to ninth grade, New Jersey remains largely in the dark,
education officials say.
That's because for all the money it
spends on education -- more than $16 billion a year in
local, state and federal dollars -- New Jersey gets low
marks for collecting and analyzing data to track student and
school performance.
Though the data exist, they are not
organized in a way that can be clearly analyzed. A renewed
effort is under way to create a central statewide tracking
system, and a pilot program has been launched this year in a
handful of districts.
In the meantime, with changing tests and
no centralized way to follow 1.4 million students over time,
education officials say it is difficult to make sense of all
the numbers beyond the snapshots the state gives in its
various annual reports.
"The more we focus on student achievement
and teacher reform, the more reliant we become on data, and
the more apparent it becomes that the state of New Jersey
has failed to keep its promise to establish this," said
Edwina Lee, executive director of the New Jersey School
Boards Association.
The issue has been pushed to the
forefront with the release of a report prepared for Gov. Jon
Corzine that called for the resurrection of a stalled
program to create a statewide database to catalogue all 1.4
million public school students.
According to the report, the program,
which would cost $10 million to create, would include test
scores, socio-economic data and other information that could
be used to track students and their schools over time and
across tests.
Over the past decade, at least two other
internal staff reports and a third commissioned by Rutgers
have recommended such a database. Lee served on the latest
panel to suggest it.
"Tracking students across the system is
of utmost importance, in order to improve educational
programs, reduce achievement gaps and target resources more
effectively," the transition report to Corzine
said.
School districts fill out at least 12
major reports a year for the state and federal governments.
The annual testing of third, fourth, eighth- and
11th-graders provides extensive details on what children
learn. Beginning this spring, students in grades 5-7 also
will be tested.
The head of the state Department of
Education's division that oversees the education mandates
set forth under the state Supreme Court's landmark Abbott v.
Burke school equity ruling says he mines the school data all
the time.
"We have a decent idea of how schools are
doing, good enough to know where we are doing well and where
we're not," said Assistant Commissioner Gordon MacInnes, who
launched a more extensive database effort that since
stalled.
But the state also has been criticized
for making decisions without hard data, and MacInnes
concedes his data could be more detailed, and provide, for
example, more than just how blacks or special education
children are doing in a given school.
"Yes, I would like to have much more
precise information," he said. "You are always better off
with more information."
One immediate issue before the state is
determining the effectiveness of the Abbott reforms. For
example, without the tracking, the state has no objective
way to determine if those children coming out of
Abbott-mandated preschool have fared better than those
without it.
Meanwhile, if the state had a centralized
system, it would also be easier to track a child who moves
from school to school. And in a state where as many as one
in three children in some districts change schools in a
given year, there is no assurance that a child's performance
will be followed.
But a database would go beyond tracking
individual children.
And as the state develops programs such
as extra teacher training in high school math or special
education literacy, there is no way to measure which efforts
might work with which students.
Philip Mackey, a former Rutgers
University professor who compiles a biennial report on New
Jersey education measures, wrote in 2002 that the state is
falling further behind by failing to establish a statewide
database. Today, more than 30 states say they have a
statewide student database and the ability to track
performance, according to national reports.
Much of the hope now rests on the revival
of what was called NJ SMART (New Jersey Standards
Measurement and Resource for Teaching), which was proposed
in 2002. With the goal of creating a statewide database,
more than $1.2 million was spent on its design and other
logistics.
But funding and interest dwindled and the
program didn't get off the ground. Now the state wants to
revive it, with some modifications. The state may have
little choice as well, as the requirements of the federal No
Child Left Behind act demand more sophisticated data
tracking than ever.
State officials are moving slowly. The
program was launched this year in three districts -- Newark,
Burlington and Salem -- and officials said it could expand
next fall. No timeline has been set for taking the program
statewide.
Logistically, creating a single database
for 1.4 million schoolchildren is daunting.
Mackey's report in 2002 recommended that
given the state's history, the task be handled outside the
state Department of Education, an effort that likely would
still take five years. A similar outside system in Michigan
took six years to launch, he said. Standards had to be
developed for each data set, staff had to be trained and the
hardware and software tested.
Just figuring out how to identify each
child is open to debate. The initial idea was to use a
Social Security number, but many children, especially newly
arrived immigrants, don't have one. So for now, New Jersey,
like other states, would use a 10-digit "identifier"
number.
There are other privacy issues as well,
such as whether schools or others should have access to a
child's information beyond test scores.
And just ensuring that the data that
districts submit are reliable and standardized is never easy
in a state of more than 600 school systems, each with its
own way of doing things.
MacInnes said the biggest challenge is
getting all districts to provide the same data.
"It's not even financially that bad,"
MacInnes said. "The puzzle is really that so much of the
data is not that good."
Acting Education Commissioner Lucille
Davy said she is convinced that a statewide database will be
established.
About $1.5 million has been committed to
the launch of the latest program.
"The purpose obviously will be to
determine what we are doing is effective," she said. "What's
important in my mind is that we are focused on
that."
John Mooney covers education. He may be reached at
jmooney@starledger.com or (973) 392-1548.
© 2006 The Star-Ledger. Used by NJ.com with
permission.
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