San Diego County Office of Education

Befriend districts working on similar challenges

We first started getting excited about this project when we attended the Digital Promise Data Interoperability Bootcamp in October 2019 in Austin, Texas. Eighteen school districts came together to share their challenges and successes. We were selected as one of the five core districts to be part of the Assessment Data Interoperability Challenge Collaborative. 

Through this collaborative, we began to self-assess our own systems (using the CoSN Interoperability Model) and started to develop more focus around the questions we needed to answer for our individual district context. This kickoff meeting helped us outline the technical and governance work we needed to do. We also worked on a “user story”– defining a persona for who we were trying to solve problems for and why it mattered. This helped us simplify our requirements for what we wanted to build. After this meeting, we were energized to dig in to this project!

Pointers: 

1. Find a network of other districts who you can bounce ideas off of and learn from.

2. Self-assess your current systems using the COSN Interoperability Model.

3. Create a user story to simplify your requirements: who are you trying to solve problems for and why does it matter?

Focus your efforts on a specific challenge before trying to scale

Originally, we wanted to build a dashboard that showed data from elementary school through career – so we thought about building a team that included all of those stakeholders. We chose three districts for our pilot team, but quickly realized that having such a wide representation was making the challenge more difficult than it needed to be. 

Most of the districts in our county are elementary school districts, and primary grades are easier to collect and analyze data for. We decided to pivot and focus only on elementary school literacy data first. Once that was successful, we could scale to include other forms of data or other grades. 

Pointers: 

1. Choose a smaller pilot network of school districts (if you’re a county) or schools (if you’re a district) to work with on the initial prototype. We chose 3 districts for our initial pilot.

2. Focus on aligning data horizontally for similar grades before trying to scale vertically to all levels.

3. Consider starting with elementary levels, since the data can be more structured.

Create a shared data agreement to build understanding across districts

Data interoperability isn’t just technical in nature. As we dove into this challenge, it quickly became clear that some of the biggest problems we needed to solve were operational. All of our 42 districts were using different data agreements. We began working on a universal memorandum of understanding so that we could become the central location for this data to flow. Without this MOU, we don’t have access to the data we need to help districts get aligned.

Pointers: 

1. Be prepared to solve more than just technical challenges– data interoperability requires solving operational challenges as well.

2. Spend time talking to all the districts, schools, and educational partners in your community and find out how data is currently being gathered. If you can streamline this process, consider forming a team to build universal data agreements.