From K to 12 and Beyond: Tracking Student Progress
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How should schools track student progress?
In my last post, I discussed how longitudinal data systems are intended to support data-driven decisions to increase student achievement and close achievement gaps. Race to the Top encourages states to expand these systems to include additional programs and data. Race to the Top further encourages states to work together to use longitudinal data systems across states.
Yet states face the challenge of expanding these systems and coordinating with these diverse stakeholders in the face of austere budget constraints.
With these challenges in mind, let’s consider two alternate approaches for expanding longitudinal data systems to share data and analyze student progress across a student’s educational career.
Option 1: Establish a Statewide Student ID
The first possible approach to sharing data across these institutions is to establish a statewide clearinghouse that assigns a unique, statewide student ID for every student in the state. That ID would follow the student from institution to institution, so that progress and results could be tracked across programs. In fact, many states have already implemented this approach as part of establishing K-12 longitudinal data systems.
The challenge with this approach is that as longitudinal data systems expand to incorporate preschool and postsecondary institutions, the burden falls on these other institutions to change or enhance their IT systems to accept, use and report using a new student ID.
Furthermore, as more and more programs create and use a common identifier, there is more opportunity for errors and misuse. Jon Smith’s identifier gets mistakenly used for Jonathan Smith, even though they’re different students. Sarahi Valente gets assigned a different identifier from Sarai Valente Mendez, even though they’re the same student. Also, statewide student IDs won’t help states share data or longitudinal data systems with other states.
Option 2: Create a Master Student Index
Rather than force legacy IT systems to use a new identifier, a less invasive approach is to deploy a master data management solution called a Master Student Index.
A Master Student Index establishes a registry or reference of students and the systems that house their data. A Master Student Index knows that Sarai Valente Mendez is known by the identifier “123456” in the Washington County School District, but known by the identifier “456789” to Washington Technical College.
Neither of these systems need to accept a new identifier or even to know what other systems have data about a student.
The Master Student Index maintains the cross-reference of student identifiers and can even relate these identifiers to existing K-12 statewide student IDs. Any institution that reports student data can provide their existing, local student IDs and let the Master Student Index relate the data to the right student. Similarly, a Master Student Index allows multiple states to share data without requiring a common student identifier.
This Master Student Index approach results in fewer changes to existing IT systems, meaning that this approach is less expensive and reduces barriers to adoption by the institutions that need to cooperate.
In my next post, I’ll discuss capabilities that you should look for to identify a Master Student Index that meets your needs.
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