The San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools (SBCSS) office has made significant strides in recent years overhauling the ways in which the county presents data and resources to district leaders, educators, families and other stakeholders vital to supporting the SBCSS’s Cradle to Career Roadmap initiative.
Originally, the county office, which supports 33 school districts serving nearly 400,000 students, attempted to create a one-stop shop. However, a single platform that encompassed public data, secure student-level data and a repository of resources was hindered by technical limitations.
Breaking the project into key elements has made each part more manageable, said John Massie, SBCSS program manager for assessment, data analytics, research and evaluation.
To best ensure the utilization of data to improve teaching and learning, SBCSS developed the County Assessment Network (SBCAN) and an interactive state assessment report that led to data-sharing agreements with every district in the county. Additionally, local assessment data is collected from vendors including iReady, NWEA and STAR, creating countywide reports to fill the data void in non-state-tested grades, which was crucial during the pandemic when local assessments offered real-time insights into student progress.
Most importantly, Massie said, such clear and up-to-date reports ensure that data is turned into actionable insights that improve teaching and learning.
Cradle to Career Roadmap website
The SBCSS’s Cradle to Career Roadmap website was developed to educate and support stakeholders throughout the county by identifying key milestones in a child’s academic and social-emotional readiness, while encouraging community partnerships to support the goal of meeting the educational needs of all students from cradle to career. Resources are organized by each type of stakeholder group: Families, educators, government officials, business and labor leaders, or community and faith-based organizations. From there, resources are easily filtered by topic and the child’s age.
“We’re trying to create a repository of resources — our county resources, state resources, community resources — so that you have one place to go to get this information,” Massie explained. “If you look at grades 4 through 6, for example, they should be competent in reading and math by the end of sixth grade. That’s a milestone to help them be successful. On the social-emotional side, they need to be able to make friends, understand social rules and consequences. Being a former middle school principal, I can tell you that definitely is where the work is with kids that age.”
If a child is struggling to meet those milestones, the Cradle to Career Roadmap website provides resources to support families and others in helping them get to where they need to be.
Open Data Portal
The county’s Open Data Portal makes public data accessible and easy to understand and interact with for the general public. “We also wanted to create this data portal because a lot of education data is dense or it’s hard to find. This is all publicly available data, but if you went to the [California Department of Education] and tried to find this, it wouldn’t be as interactive,” Massie said.
The portal includes student enrollment, graduation rates, student demographics and more, with information available as interactive graphs, charts and maps — which can be disaggregated by indicator, student group, grade level, year, district-, county- or state-level and more. And, with about 10 years of data available, Massie said the portal allows visitors to identify trends.
By making this information more easily accessible and designing the site for use by the general public, the portal plays an important role in increasing transparency in the county.
It’s also helping families and district leaders. “For our districts, we built this for them so they can just screenshot this or that and now they can drop it into a board report or whatever they want, it makes it a lot easier for them to customize it,” Massie said. “And they seem to really appreciate that because it allows them to focus on other things than pulling a data file, putting it together, making a graph … We want focus on, ‘okay, now you know what your data is telling you, what are you doing about it?’”
For families, the portal also includes tools like the “meal map,” which shows parents where they can find meals during the summer, child care, expanded learning options and more — all with more accurate, up-to-date information than what can be found in state-run apps and websites.
Local Data Project
Not all data is meant for the public — particularly that which can lead to the identification of individual students — but is vital to educational decision making. Focused on local assessment data, the Local Data Project allows districts to easily and privately access their most up-to-date information and compare it from one year to the next, or to other districts in the county.
“We upload it every week when the report is live for them to have and they can monitor how their students are doing the first day of school, the 10th day of school, the 100th day of school — whenever they want to go there, it’s updated every single week and they can start to see how their students are performing,” Massie said. “But probably the most interesting part was the districts didn’t just want to see their data, they wanted to see how the county did, they wanted to see how their region did, they wanted to see other districts as well. So, if there was a school doing something or district doing something interesting, they could go reach out and find out more.”
While SBCSS continues to build out these programs, Massie said streamlining processes, improving ease of use and simplifying the look of the final products is what will help the county meet its ultimate goal of improving learning outcomes.
“Our goal is getting the right data in the right hands at the right time — that is what we live for, because people make better decisions then,” he said. “We want to make sure we get data and turn it into information, and turn information into action. Lowering those barriers between people and their data allows them to do that.”
