Data Warehousing and DashboardsThe Challenge

The national educational reform movement continues to place increased emphasis on data for program, personnel, and financial accountability. Consequently, there is an increased interest on the part of school systems to develop and manage data warehousing systems. However, despite school district initiatives to deploy data warehouses, collecting more and more data and managing and storing that data longitudinally has (and will continue to) result in data overload and data exhaustion. As a result, feeling “Data Rich and Information Poor®” is all too common. To benefit from data warehousing, school systems must expand their mental models from merely data itself to systemic, analytic models that simplify and extract meaning from data. Failure to make this change will result in school systems managing and digesting increased amounts of data, all the while starving themselves of actual information.

The challenge for local school systems is that they often do not have the necessary analytic sophistication or capabilities within their organizations to analyze and extract meaningful information from the data within their warehouses.  One way to encounter these challenges is for school districts to extend their capacity and capabilities through external partnerships.

The Solution

The ECRA Collaborative Research and Information Service Solution (ECRISS) overcomes this challenge by providing human resources expertise along with data warehousing technology. This unique approach of providing data warehousing, reporting, and dashboard technology along with research scientists, statisticians, and content area experts allows districts to use ECRA not only to manage data, but to extract the meaning from data.

Bundling data management services and technology with research, statistical expertise, and reporting enables districts to use ECRA as a third party department of research and accountability at a fraction of the cost it would require to build similar capacity within the district.

In addition to fully managed data warehouses, ECRISS includes:
  • An online school intelligence portal to access data, reports, dashboards, and research
  • A bank of service hours for use, including, but not limited to:
    • Growth model development
    • Cut score and placement algorithm development
    • Performance metrics and dashboard development
    • Development of growth components for principal and teacher evaluation
    • Program evaluation

ECRA's Recently-Announced ECRISS School Intelligence Platform

Powered by ECRA's data warehousing, research, and analytic infrastructure, the ECRISS School Intelligence Platform consolidates all of a school district's performance data into a single integrated environment to support decision-making. The platform, called "ECRISS", provides clients a secure single-sign-on portal to manage and communicate individual student, program, personnel, and financial performacne to internal and external stakeholders. ECRISS provides a solution for districts to overcome the burden and cost of expanding data and technology systems within their district by providing the technology and human resources needed to bring decisions into focus.