Quad Cities, IL/IA
TELL OUR STORY: Data Warehousing
In our community, our grade-level reading initiative has never focused on creating new direct services.
Instead, we have been creating infrastructure that supports existing services and the local agencies
which provide them.
One of our main areas of focus has been data. For example, our partnership created a Kindergarten
Skills Inventory – the first community-wide measurement of school readiness in the Quad Cities area –
which is now being administered annually in all 8 local school districts. In 2014, this inventory will be
used to measure outcomes for 4 preschool initiatives that Achieve Quad Cities funded in the current
school year.
Our greatest achievement in this arena, however, came in January 2014, when we completed the first
phase of the creation of a single data warehouse, which will pool select student-level statistics from all 8
school districts. This warehouse will allow us to come up with a single community-wide statistic for key
educational milestones. We will also be able to track educational outcomes for students participating in
different local interventions and programs.
Most importantly, the Data Warehouse will allow us to compare student outcomes longitudinally. We
will be able to, for example, compare the readiness assessment of each incoming kindergartener this
year with their 3rd-grade reading test scores four years from now. This will give us up-to-date local data
on early identification of students who will need extra supports to read at grade level – not only by their
academic performance, but by demographics, poverty level, and/or neighborhood. It will allow us to
create finely-targeted, custom-built interventions to address any specific trends which negatively impact
student literacy.
To achieve this level of detail, we will need to collect identified student data – name, address, ethnicity,
Individual Education Plan status, etc. – which is normally forbidden under the Family Educational Rights
and Privacy Act (FERPA). Many education initiatives get around FERPA by asking for parental permission
for access to protected data. We knew, however, that the students we were most interested in tracking
were likely to have parents who were not engaged enough in their children’s education to return
permission slip forms.
Fortunately, FERPA does allow for the sharing of protected, identified information without parental
permission if the data will be used for research which will improve educational outcomes for students in
the district – which is precisely our purpose in gathering these data. We partnered with one of our local
institutions of higher learning, St. Ambrose University, to house the Data Warehouse and conduct this
research on our students’ behalf.
We have been fortunate to have all 8 school districts sitting at the table since our partnership first
formed 5 years ago. Our partnerships always conform to the Collective Impact model, which means that
we coordinate our activities with our partners, without ever dictating to the partners how they should or
should not conduct their business. This has been particularly appreciated by our school districts, and
has allowed them to be more open to considering new community partnerships. This long history and
level of trust has allowed us to bring all 8 of our school districts on board to participate in our Data
Warehouse project.
The Master Data-Sharing Agreement has been vetted by lawyers, reviewed by 8 school boards, and
signed by all 8 superintendents. We are now working with a national data company to customize their
software to our purposes. Our Warehouse should be up and live in time for the start of the 2014-15
school year.
This project required almost three years of focused work, and more long meetings than we can count,
but the product will be a powerful tool which will help us identify which students most need our help
and which interventions in our community are most successful in meeting that need.
We are glad to share more detailed information about our Data Warehouse project, including copies of
our Data-Sharing Agreement, with any other GLR community. Contact Alex Kolker at United Way of the
Quad Cities Area at akolker@unitedwayqc.org.