Implement, Improve and Expand Your Statewide Longitudinal Data System: Creating a Culture of Data in Education

CHAPTER 8

Sharing Information with Others

Access to and use of longitudinal data can usher in a new era of accountability for state educational systems, leading to better outcomes for students. In the next two chapters, we focus on how and why the information in the SLDS (statewide longitudinal data system) can and should be shared with those audiences with a right to access it and linking longitudinal data to such systems as the Instructional Improvement System (IIS). The IIS and other transactional systems that help teachers and students in the classroom can benefit from longitudinal data being joined with current assessments and gradebooks to help teachers build an improvement plan for each student based on best practices over many years that can be found in the SLDS. Longitudinal and historical data can be used to improve classroom practice of today and the future. Teachers and administrators have an obvious and ongoing need to access student data, and at a different level than other publics; these groups are discussed in detail in the next chapter. This chapter will outline the other key stakeholder groups as shown in Figure 8.1 that are entitled to access some longitudinal data, and how facilitating that access can make the education system as a whole more successful. For the purposes of Chapters 8 and 9, we will use longitudinal data to describe the output from the SLDS, a set of reports used to help make better decisions in these other systems.

Figure 8.1 SLDS Stakeholders ...