Data-Driven Decision Making | News

Texas Education Agency Rolling Out Statewide Data Warehouse

• By David Nagel
• 11/16/11

The Texas Education Agency is deploying a longitudinal data system for the roughly 1,200 school districts across the state.

Built on eScholar's Complete Data Warehouse for PK-12, the system will be used to house a range of student and school information that can be accessed by district administrators and used as part of their decision-making process.

CDW-PK12 is a commercial system for collecting and managing data for longitudinal and comprehensive data analysis in primary and secondary education. It encompasses more than 3,000 data points focused on PK-12, from administrative and financial records to teacher and student data to course and assessment information. It supports a range of commercial and open technologies, including Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, and ODBC-complaint tools.

According to eScholar, the TEA implementation will be deployed as a "district-facing warehouse ... [that] will allow administrators and teachers access to valuable operational and student-level information from which to make decisions. The information that is collected ranges from student attendance records to financial budgets. eScholar CDW integrates and consolidates this information--otherwise dispersed across the enterprise and in disparate data sources--managing data integrity and applying data quality and validation to ensure consistency. eScholar CDW presents the information for analysis and reporting to a wide range of stakeholders and users, including administrators at all levels, teachers, counselors, support staff and students."

According to Shawn Bay, CEO and founder of eScholar: "Our work with Texas will continue to help us push beyond the way most longitudinal data systems are being used and thought of today," he said in a prepared statement. "Data will be updated frequently and accessible in ways that allow educators to help individual students quickly. We are honored to be asked to play a key role in this important initiative."

Twelve other state agencies are currently using CDW-PK-12, representing, in total, more than 3,500 districts and about 35 percent of the student population in the United States, according to eScholar. Additional details can be found on eScholar's site.