DATA-COPE Newsletter # 4: STATS-DC Roundup and 2015 Plans
DATA-COPE Members,
I hope you have all had an enjoyable and productive summer. It was great to see so many DATA-COPE members at STATS-DC this year and to talk with many of you about how to be more involved. A number of great ideas came up in discussions with many of you at the conference and I've been working one-on-one with
a few of you on how best to implement these ideas
In this newsletter:
My thoughts on STATS-DC
Call for DATA-COPE Governance Board Members
DATA-COPE projects for 2015-2016
DJ's thoughts on STATS-DC
My highlights from STATS-DC
From my perspective, almost every session I attended was high quality (not something I find each year), but the true highlights were the session on ARNIEdocs and the sessions on the use of the SDP College-Going Toolkit at the Nassau BOCCES and the Delaware teacher evaluation and staffing data presentations.
Another highlight for me was getting to talk with DATA-COPE members at dinner and happy your. Next year we'll make sure to advertise the happy hour location better and maybe I'll bring a sign! What I heard consistently in those conversations is that DATA-COPE members desire more training and more ways to give voice to the work already being done by the community in districts and states around the country. If you feel this way, the rest of this newsletter is for you because we've been thinking about ways to expand the engagement of the community!
DATA-COPE Governance Board
DATA-COPE is growing enough that there is a need for some more organizational structure. While I have enjoyed the opportunity to play Benevolent Dictator for Life I also haven't been able to keep up on the job very well. I'm proposing the creation of a governance board with clear responsibilities for each member as a way to distribute the load of running the organization and take advantage of the many skills of our members.
Here are a few things we need done:
Track membership and recruit new members
Rebuild the website and maintain it
Seek out some minor revenue and manage organizational records
Write articles and contribute to the public facing site
Identify news items of interest to members and communicate them out
If you are interested in these things and in taking a more active role in the community, please reach out to myself or DJ directly. You can find our contact information on www.datacope.org or message us on the forums.
DATA-COPE Projects for 2015-16
At STATS-DC I got to do some brainstorming with several DATA-COPE members -- special shout outs to Deborah Jonas, Carla Howe, Wendy Geller, Ellis Ott, and Karen Levesque for their ideas and suggestions. The following is a not-so-comprehensive list of ideas.
1) Methodological Triage (short brief discussing different methodological approaches and their pros and cons)
2) R Training (online or in-person?)
3) Interviews with DATA-COPE members about their work
4) Edited book (chapters on how to do analytics in a large educational organization)
5) Researcher vetting (share trusted researchers' names with one another)
6) Critiques of existing education research (rapid response, or build a library of these critiques up)
7) Math analysts up to co-author papers together on mutually interesting topics
8) Mentorship program (more senior analysts provide guidance as needed to recently hired analysts)
If you are interested in any of these topics or participating please head to the forums and let us know!
DJ's Thoughts on STATS-DC
One of the biggest takeaways I have from this year’s Stats DC Conference is how much the value it adds to the field of education data use is growing while the opportunities for people to participate are shrinking. Three years ago, tight federal budgets led to the NCES winter data conference (MIS) being moved to the same coast as the summer Stats DC conference. A year later, the winter conference was dropped altogether, and the summer Stats conference was combined with the NCES EDFacts/CCD/CRDC training sessions. And now this year was the first conference since the majority of the SLDS FY09/ARRA grants ended, and so many of those teams were no longer covered to travel. There are normally close to 800 in attendance at Stats, but I would be surprised if this year’s conference reached two-thirds of that. This is the single best opportunity for so many working in and with states and districts, and the feds, to share essential information about best practices around data use that is not available anywhere else. States and districts and their partners shared valuable information and innovative ideas in sessions on instructional and P-20W metrics and analytics, and advances in linking data sources and customizing end-user data tools. Fortunately, the new WDQI and EC grants afforded additional opportunities to learn more again this year about the two ends of the P-20W continuum. Hopefully the forthcoming SLDS FY15 grants will seed a significant number of grantees for next year, but the best thing that could happen for this field is to have the program increase in FY16 to fund another round from this year’s large application pool. And it would be great to have a funding source to support district data use as well. Given the content presented at Stats in this and recent years, it’s obvious that there is a lot of great work to seed and scale.
The other big takeaway from Stats was just how much collaboration goes on in this community. Collaboration was definitely the main thread through almost every session and the conversations in between. There were multiple sessions where states described their collaborations with each other, with districts, non-profits, the feds, research partners, and vendors. And these were not just individuals coming together to form a diverse panel; many of these sessions provided information on current and potential working relationships. State data managers and others from WV, ME, DE, and AZ conducted a really interesting panel discussion on vendor relationships (where vendors also include researchers). They gave very frank advise about the specifying capabilities and expectations in the RPFs, contacting more states or districts than a vendor provides as references, evaluating in-house services along the same ROI measures, and most importantly, for vendors, the value of communicating openly, early, and often. The states’ Data Use Standards Workgroup described their collaborative efforts that created and revised their data use competencies, for educators and others, that they are now looking into implementing. We’ll be following up with them to share the latest version of their Standards guide on our group site. The RELs session described the type of collaboration involved in their work; though, it would have been great to hear from some of the states and districts they worked with. I also got a lot of great tips from Jared and Karen Levesque’s session for working with agencies in the data request process and in the data use stage. Every year it’s obvious that attending Stats is one of the best things a
researcher who is interested in working with administrative data can do for themselves. This year
was certainly no exception.
Thanks!
Finally -- thanks to all of you who spread the word about DATA-COPE, browse the forums, share your insights with us, and continue to work hard to raise the analytic capacity of states and districts across the country. It's great to have your attention if even for a few moments in a newsletter!
Best,
Jared Knowles