February 26, 2009 | Read Time: 3 minutes
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in Seattle, has awarded $22-million for projects to help schools, districts, and states gather and use data to improve high-school students’ academic achievement.
The goal is to gather data “that will inform decision making at all levels in the system,” Vicki L. Phillips, director of education at the foundation, says. “Useful data and solid research about what works will help empower teachers, schools, and districts to more effectively keep students on the path to success in college and beyond.”
Three grants totaling $4.2million focus on national efforts to collect and analyze information on how much progress students are making academically.
The National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit organization in Herndon, Va., for example, was awarded $2.9-million over two years to bolster its StudentTracker for High Schools research service.
The clearinghouse maintains a registry of student records on college enrollment and degree completion. Student-loan providers, employers, government agencies, and others use the registry to verify student records.
When the new system is in place, probably in 2011, school districts will be able to get more-detailed information than is currently available, such as the percentage of students who went to two-year colleges versus four-year institutions or what percentage went to out-of-state colleges.
High schools will also be able to submit data about their students, such as race or ethnicity, gender, home address, participation in the subsidized-lunch program, or enrollment in academic programs such as the International Baccalaureate, and then get information about the percentage of different groups of students who went on to college.
Right now, the only information most high schools have about the percentage of students who enroll in college is based on surveys of students, usually taken in the spring of their senior year, says Richard J. Reeves, director of research services at the National Student Clearinghouse.
“It’s been pretty well established that what students say they’re going to do in the fall isn’t always what they really do in the fall,” he says. “They tend to overreport their college-going rates. Maybe they haven’t even applied, or they haven’t gotten their financial-aid offer yet, so they don’t know if the cost will be reasonable.”
Three grants totaling $9.8-million were awarded for research on how to measure teacher effectiveness and its impact on student achievement.
Four projects in Texas — which, according to the Gates foundation, has been a leader in the development of educational data systems — will receive a total of $8-million.
The Texas High School Project, in Dallas, won a $2.9-million grant over two years for an effort to help the eight largest urban school districts in the state, as well as IDEA Public Schools, a nonprofit organization that runs charter schools in the Rio Grande Valley, assess their systems for tracking student data and develop plans to strengthen them.
The goal is to create systems that provide meaningful information that district leaders can use to make better policy decisions and teachers and counselors can use to help students, says John Fitzpatrick, executive director of the Texas High School Project.
Now, he says, it’s not unusual for a school district’s data on academic performance, attendance, health, and students who have dropped out to be stored in different databases.
“We’re sort of data rich and information poor in education,” says Mr. Fitzpatrick.
For more information: Go to http://www.gatesfoundation.org.
