inBloom, Train Wrecks, and Ed-Fi

As I sat down to write this entry, my day was interrupted most unusually.  Doug texted me the picture to the left.  The caption said simply, “Say hello to 26th street and the railroad track.”  In the picture I saw the same view I see every work morning from the “Big Table” here at UPD where many of us sit.  After more than 4 inches of rain over 36 hours, the ground right outside our office gave way taking more than a dozen cars and half the street with it.  If you watch the video (found below) of the ground as it collapses underneath the cars, you will see that it left the wall with nothing to hold, and fell under its own weight.  The stories on the news have since revealed that the neighborhood has know this was a problem for years, but their complaints and concerns met a deaf ear in the city and with the rail company.

 

It’s hard to see such a calamity and think not metaphorically about my originally intended subject: the collapse of inBloom. inBloom was, in lieu of a more boring technical description, a cloud based data integration technology, that would enable districts and states to connect their data to an “app store” of programs and dashboards that could sit on top.  The vision was a seamless and less expensive way for teachers and principals to gain easy access to data about their students.

 

inBloom was a very big deal.  Started in 2011, several big funders and education heavies devoted their credibility and more than $100 million to try to make it successful.  Their efforts succeeded in garnering several state and district partners.  But since its inception, consumer groups, parents, and privacy advocates have worried that placing their students data in the hands of a third party would not be safe.  Or worse, inBloom might “sell” their student’s data to the highest bidder.  Then came Edward Snowden, and what was a niche news story went prime time.

 

If you look at the technology within inBloom that transfers and stores data in the cloud, the critics did not have much of a leg to stand on. inBloom’s data protection technology is as good or better than just about any existing state or district.  If you look at inBloom’s license agreement, parents and privacy advocates had more explicit protections than they have now with many student data systems.  What caused inBloom to collapse as quickly as the wall outside my window was more fundamental: trust.  As citizens, we trust districts and states with our students’ data.  And for all of inBloom’s technical explanations on the security of the data, they never made the case that we could trust them as an organization.  With the withdrawal of Louisiana, New York, Colorado, and several districts, nothing could hold inBloom up.

 

Over the past year at UPD, we’ve done a lot of work with the Ed-Fi data integration and dashboard suite.  We successfully rolled out the system for the entire State of South Carolina in about nine months (public dashboards here) and are very excited to start work with the Cleveland Metropolitan Public Schools to implement Ed-fi there.  Ed-Fi is very different than inBloom, even though they both utilize the same underlying data model.  Based on extensive research on what teachers and principals say they need, Ed-Fi provides a set of powerful data integration and dashboard tools that a district or state can download for free.  Rather than shooting data up into the cloud, Ed-Fi lives where most people already trust, in the data centers of the district or states.  19 states and more than 7,000 districts have licensed Ed-Fi.

 

The tragedy of inBloom is that it was a great idea ahead of its time and stood to do a lot of good in education.  But the protectors of the status quo should see no victory in its collapse.  Teachers and principals are clamoring for better information to help their students.  Ed-Fi seems ready to pick up where inBloom left off, and do so with the trust this work requires.

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This blog was written by Bryan Richardson. Bryan is a Partner at UPD Consulting and brings over thirteen years of experience in private and public sector management. Bryan holds national expertise in performance management, data systems, and complex project implementation. 

Asking the Right Questions—Data Privacy and Security

There are a lot of good signs to be seen in recent news about security and privacy in the education technology sector. Some of the key questions being asked by educators and administrators are “how well are student data protected from prying eyes and greedy corporations?” and “who has access and how are the data being used?” These are good questions, and they represent the vestiges of our struggles with adopting modern technology over the past 15 years. Conversations have matured from simple arguments around the value of computers in every classroom to philosophical debates about our organizations’ embrace of performance data as the ombudsman of quality education. Progress has clearly been made, but in our rush to catch-up with our corporate cousins we missed asking what turns out to be a pretty important question–who owns all this stuff?

 

That’s the question that ultimately sealed the fate of inBloom, a non-profit offering a cloud-based data warehouse designed to help districts and vendors share student information. Despite funding from big foundation names like Gates and Carnegie, inBloom collapsed under the weight of a five word question they were never able to answer well enough to satisfy concerned stakeholders. If data are stored on a machine that is not physically located in a building owned by the district, who really owns the data?

The data issue is really a matter of security and access, which isn’t so different from the days of paper records in filing cabinets–information was kept in a secure, locked location and only certain people had access. With data warehouses replacing filing cabinets, the difference is that the information is stored off-site and the keys are also in the hands of the data warehouse manager (in other words, the system or database administrator). inBloom failed to effectively communicate this subtle difference early on, and any answer they eventually provided came across as reactionary, slick, dishonest, and–my favorite new term–“hand-wavy.”

 

Schools and districts aren’t used to asking those questions, and the education technology sector isn’t used to answering them. This disconnect doomed the effort from the beginning. Had the question “who owns this stuff?” been asked early on, the answer would have at least brokered a conversation rather than distrust and eventual dismissal–not to mention a waste of about $100 million dollars in grant funding.

 

Ideally, that conversation would lead to a compromise where information storage and archiving solutions satisfy the security and access needs of all players–parents, teachers, administrators, and the general public. Perhaps the right solution keeps an element of the status quo: secure data such as individual names, contact information, and other personally identifiable information could be stored on-site with the keys in the hands of the same people, but the bulk of the data could be stored in the cloud. Hybrid solutions like this are possible with dashboard software like Ed-Fi where the software itself can be installed on-site along with the secure data and set up to pull the remainder of the data from the cloud.

 

In the consulting world at UPD, we see those disconnect problems all the time: Group A spends a ton of time and money solving a problem for Group B without ever truly engaging the members of Group B. inBloom undoubtedly engaged their stakeholders in the early stages, but not deep enough to where someone was able to ask “who owns all this stuff?” This is often the result of too much focus on delivering a solution and providing answers rather than asking questions and identifying the problem. It comes with the territory–we get so excited about the possibilities of new technology that we jump right into requirements gathering without stopping to think if we’re asking the right questions and solving the right problem. It might just be as simple as an issue of maturity; if we’re getting serious about our relationship with technology, it’s probably time we start asking about intentions.

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This blog was written by Andrew Keller. Andrew is a Consultant at UPD Consulting and brings over 10 years of experience in education, policy, and data metrics.  

The Follower’s Manifesto

In my six years of teaching, I had plenty of colleagues who carried on non-stop private conversations through every faculty and department meeting they attended. The very educators who brought down the wrath of God on misbehaving or inattentive students became pouty, apathetic, or downright antagonistic when another adult had the gall to suggest that there was something these individuals needed to know or had yet to learn.

I know this mindset well, as I possessed it for a time:

“What does Vice Principal Smith know? He hasn’t been a teacher for 10 years…”

“I wish they’d let me get back to my classroom—I have so much to do and this is useless.”

“How could a consultant, who has never taught, possibly give me any advice about education?”

To be sure, some of this anger and indifference is well founded. I cannot count the number of faculty meetings I sat through where the principal read aloud (verbatim) from a schedule that affected 1/10^th of the school’s population. But to focus on this smaller point is to obscure a larger one: as much as we often hear that we lack good leaders in the education world, I believe the bigger problem is that we lack good followers.

Very few people have the privilege of holding a role in life in which they are consistently leaders, always laying out an agenda to be executed by those around them. Instead, most of us hold a more nebulous position—we are leaders of some and followers of others, and these roles change over time. Teachers are the perfect example of this—student achievement in the classroom requires great leadership on their part, but that leadership must be informed and supported through the following of administrative guidance, research-based standards of practice, community desires, and expert advice.  Yet while educational literature is rife with treatises on leadership (one of my primary introductory packets to Teach For America in 2004 was called Teaching as Leadership), there is little talk of following.

So what are the characteristics of a good follower, and how will they make a difference in education? With the help of the comparatively sparse followership literature[1], I’ve compiled this non-comprehensive list:

1. Good Followers are Open-minded. Too often in education, we assume that the best ideas for student achievement are contained in our own heads, or at the very least within our own dogma. We must be willing to adjust our approaches based on the advice, feedback, and new sources of information we receive.
2. Good Followers Disagree and Commit. Even good leaders will make decisions that their followers may not always agree with. This is perfectly reasonable, and followers should feel free to communicate that disagreement to leaders. However, once a decision has been finalized, followers must commit to act upon it as if it was their own. Refusal to act upon a decision prevents evaluation of the decision’s effects further down the road. This is the piece that I and my colleagues most often struggled with as teachers. It was easier to poo-poo a new administrative initiative about backwards planning for a million little reasons, than it was to buy into this initiative and change our ways.
3. Good Followers are Active Listeners and Collaborators. Listening to and participating in a conversation requires full attention and critical, collaborative thinking. The non-stop responsibilities of most jobs (especially teaching) can also function as excuses to mentally (or even physically) check out of one’s listening responsibilities. Grading takes precedence over listening to a department head, lesson planning replaces one-on-one time with a mentor. I know—I’ve been there. But I also know that listening and participating in collaborative opportunities is an important part of creating school culture and promoting practices that improve student achievement. It is through this collaboration that decisions are made and tested, and that leadership is held accountable.

With support from UPD’s Bob Pipik, Nick Goding, and (former employee) Dustin Odham, Highland Park High School in Topeka, KS has taken advantage of a federal grant to install a collaborative process of student and classroom data evaluation. Every progress report and grading period, teacher teams meet to examine trends in student attendance, grades, behavior, and test scores, both within their classroom and throughout the team. Students who are at risk are identified and intervened with as a team or individually using a “Student Tracker” created and molded through an iterative process of teacher and administrative feedback. This approach has led to a narrowing of the achievement gap between African American and White students, and has improved student test scores overall by almost 10 percentage points. And all of this has come as a direct result of attentive and excellent followership. It is true that school administration wrote the grant and initiated the data evaluation process (and for that they should be praised), but it was the school’s teachers who approached the process with an open mind, contributed to its functioning through collaboration with leadership, with outsiders (UPD), and among themselves during the teacher team meetings, and they have remained committed to its functioning for the past two and a half years.

It should be obvious that we can’t all be leaders all of the time, but that doesn’t mean we must resign ourselves to lives as desk jockeys, pushing paper for the man.  While my examples throughout this blog are based at the school level, the call for good followers is a universal one in the field of education (and beyond). Equity and excellence in public education will require that most of us make a commitment not just to lead, but to follow. From teachers to bureaucrats to consultants, we can shape and challenge our leaders, and the world around us, through our openness, our commitment, our action, our honesty. It’s time that “follower” stopped being a dirty word.

TM

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[1] See Kellerman, Barbara. Followership: How Followers Are Creating and Changing Leaders. Harvard Business School Press, Cambridge, MA. February 18, 2008 as a prime example of the emerging field.

–Tim Marlowe

Stuck in the 80s

Although I have over 25 years of for-profit corporate America experience, I am not one to think that we should leverage everything from the business field to the education field.  However, I do think there are areas where the educational field could learn more from the business field.

One of those areas is student information systems, or SIS for short.  Simply stated, a good SIS manages student data and should cover areas like scheduling, grading, attendance, discipline records, etc.  I look at this as backbone stuff.  Every school has to do it and do it well.

I liken it to an accounting system in corporate America.  You have to do it well, but let’s face it, invoicing is invoicing.  Companies don’t get a competitive advantage from this activity.  (Of course they could be at a disadvantage if they don’t do it well).

When Madonna first started singing about being touched for the first time, corporate America had hundreds of accounting systems.  In fact, one company, depending on its size, could have several accounting systems.  Today, efficiency rules, and the likes of Oracle and SAP are generally used in large companies.  Large companies that have more than one accounting system are ridiculed as being behind the times.

Why then, are “a-ha” tunes still heard echoing in education halls?  I work in a small state, and there are at least ten SIS applications.  That means that data collection at a state level is complicated and knowledgeable resources in one SIS system cannot be leveraged across multiple LEAs.

The only reason to have variance is if it is bringing a significant value to the student experience.  If that advantage is not there, then one SIS should suffice for a region or state.  If you disagree, let me know and…”Hit me with your best shot.”

–AW

Improving the Ground Game in Education

We know political campaigns are driven by numbers. Since long before we started talking about data-driven decision-making as a key driver in education reform, political strategists had sophisticated models for crunching numbers and using them to determine where their money was spent, what their candidates said and where their rallies were held. But even though politics has always been a numbers game, in the aftermath of the 2012 presidential election, experts on both sides of the aisle are marveling about how the Obama campaign used innovative implementation strategies to take that game to the next level.

What does that “next level” look like? Broadly speaking, it is more precise, more dynamic and more individualized than its predecessors.  With a sophisticated strategy for using demographic data (including the 2010 census) to target resources and local campaign headquarters efficiently, Obama’s team built an unprecedented grass-roots level organization that generated support in key swing states.  They didn’t just crunch the numbers, they used them to develop a successful plan for turning them into votes.

As I read about the Obama campaign’s successful strategy, I was struck by the fact that several of the things they did very well are things that continue to serve as obstacles in implementing data-driven reforms at the state and local level in education. We know we should be using data to drive decision-making, but have we paid enough attention to our ground game?

Here are two areas where the Obama team’s strategy provides some insight into current challenges in education reform:

1. They connected their databases– When the Obama team realized that their fundraising database wasn’t connected to other key systems (such as their voter registration database), they immediately went to work, connecting all systems with critical voter information that previously didn’t talk to each other. This probably sounds eerily familiar to anyone who has worked in a school district or state-level education agency.  Separate databases are the rule, not the exception and connecting data sets to actually learn from the numbers is often a time-consuming task assigned to someone who is probably already working over-capacity. States are making progress with efforts to build longitudinal data warehouses, but progress is slow. In the meantime, people on the ground who need to use the numbers to drive decisions and resources don’t have the access they need. Instead, with the task of managing schools filled with thousands of students and teachers, leaders have to continue to build inefficient systems and work-around processes around disconnected data. We are moving to change this, but are we moving quickly enough?
2. They created an infrastructure in the field that supported their strategy– The Obama team developed sophisticated statistical models that allowed them to target groups of potential voters with extreme precision. With early warning systems and value-added growth data in student achievement, we are beginning to do the same in education. We are using data more precisely, and using it to plan instruction that targets specific students and specific skill sets. The critical difference is that the Obama team developed a new infrastructure in the field, designed to support that dynamic, individualized attention. They created small field offices in key counties, tight-knit teams of campaign staff trained specifically to provide the ground-level outreach to potential voters that their numbers told them was needed.  This is where education reform continues to lag behind. While we may be developing the systems and skills to help educators gather and analyze data, we have not made much progress in creating an infrastructure in public schools that allows us to use the data to drive action and resources quickly and creatively.

Education reform initiatives, like political campaigns, fail or succeed in their implementation. We should be looking for and learning from examples of successful implementation efforts wherever we can find them to ensure our ground game (like our president’s) is strong.

— JS

 

The Baltimore Consensus

In 2008, the Copenhagen Consensus Center asked a group of the world’s top economists to identify optimal social “investments” that could best help reduce malnutrition, broaden educational opportunity, slow global warming, cut air pollution, prevent conflict, fight disease, improve access to water and sanitation, lower trade and immigration barriers, thwart terrorism, and promote gender equality.

The experts—including five Nobel laureates—examined specific measures to spend $75 billion on more than 30 interventions and indentified the most cost-effective: increased immunization coverage, initiatives to reduce school dropout rates, community-based nutrition promotion, and micronutrient supplementation.  Besides being resource efficient, some of these measures are also very low cost-per-user, such as micronutrient supplementation: providing Vitamin A for a year costs as little as $1.20 per child, while providing Zinc costs as little as $1.

This got us at UPD thinking: what would a Copenhagen Consensus in American K-12 look like?  After all, in an age of severe budget pressures, we need to know the best measures that boards and superintendents can implement to help boost student performance.  And it would be great if those high impact measures were low cost, so we pushed ourselves to find ideas that would not require vast new resources.

Our top nine ideas share two themes: leveraging existing data and technology investments to improve instruction and enhancing human capital management.  None of our suggestions require new expenses, though they will require changes in culture and time use. Here’s our top nine:

1. Routinely examine data that comes from formative assessment data with groups of teachers, principals, and curriculum and instruction managers.  Provide the data ahead of time.
2. Implement human capital reforms that bring mutual consent to all teacher hiring.
3. Integrate student results into the performance evaluations of teachers.
4. Establish performance management/accountability processes at all levels of the organization, from central office functions to RTI in classrooms.
5. Improve targeting of professional development needs and resources in order to make average teachers better.
6. Decentralize dollars and control to the school level coupled with changes in how principals are hired and evaluated (more like coaches in professional sports).
7. Systematically capture data on student, teacher, principal participation in different interventions to effectively discern contributors to high performance.
8. Leverage technology to automatically provide parents and guardians with content that helps them supplement the scope and pacing of student curriculum.
9. Use predictive analytics to uncover students with likely future behavioral difficulties very early and mount high-impact interventions before its too difficult (JG).

What are your picks?