By Julie Hubbard - The Tennessean -

Tennessee has an arsenal of school data at its fingertips.

The Department of Education knows which students enroll in public preschool programs. It can count the number of truant kids day to day. It analyzes student test scores to identify the most effective teachers.

But it hasn't shared any of that. Those preschool programs don't know if their students outperformed others on kindergarten readiness exams; schools don't know which kids to flag for drop-out intervention; universities don't know whether they adequately prepare educators for the classroom.

"We collect data from school districts, but we have not done a good job turning that data back around in a useful way," said Rachel Woods, deputy of Tennessee's First to the Top education reform program.

But a new study on states' data warehousing systems says Tennessee is the one to watch as it uses $19 million in federal Race to the Top grant funds to launch a system that will allow high school teachers in all 136 school districts to access their students' grade, course and discipline histories, plus generate an early warning system for students who may drop out.

It will be available in the fall, with middle school data available the following school year, and elementary the year after that.

In March, the state will solicit proposals from companies to design other features of the data warehouse, which also will link to college and preschool program data for long-term student tracking.

"We can track the courses they choose to take in college, whether high school prepares them and how they did early on," Woods said. "Ultimately, you'll see an impact in student achievement."

The majority of school districts use some data to make decisions, but there isn't one elaborate system that aggregates everything available. Rutherford County, for example, uses its own Vanderbilt University-developed system to give students practice exams and predict how they may do on the state exam, while Wilson County bought software to track its dropouts.

But Tennessee is modeling parts of its data warehouse after Metro Nashville Public Schools, which launched one last year that features an early warning system for individual students. It's programmed to run reports on all students who have less than an 85 percent attendance rate, less than a 70 percent grade point average and more than five days of suspensions, flagging them for their principals.

"If all three flags are tripped, it indicates less than a 10 percent chance for them making it to graduation," said Paul Changas, Metro's executive director of research, assessment and evaluation. "The bottom line is not waiting for a kid to fail before intervening."

One day last week at Glencliff High School, for example, 18 names popped up in that range. Total enrollment isabout 1,300. The data warehouse also generated the top 10 offenses for suspensions in the past 10 days at the school, including 64 for behavior and 34 for cutting class.

It broke down the attendance rates by program — 89 percent of students have good attendance in Glencliff's hospitality program — so school officials can know which programs engage students and which don't.

Data coaches hired

Metro's technology staff of five plus two consultants built the $500,000 system starting in 2008. Before that, the district kept separate data on assessments, special education students, payroll and general student demographics.

The district used about $900,000 in Race to the Top money to hire 12 data coaches this school year, one for each school cluster, to use student information to make school decisions and train teachers how to use it to improve instruction.

"That's where we're a little different than schools across the country," said Fred Carr, the district's chief operations officer. "We don't know if others are deployed in schools to teach people what to do with it, but it's how we hope to close the loop."

Metro also can compare students in city-sponsored after-school programs to those who aren't to measure the programs' effectiveness. It can generate lists of "target kids" who may fail state exams and need remediation without teachers spending weeks combing through various reports.

Soon the state will release Teacher Value-Added Assessment Scores, or test scores measuring student-learning gains, electronically to districts, allowing them to target teachers for professional development. That was impossible when principals and teachers were being mailed paper reports. It also can use teachers' value-added scores as predictors on how some students will fare in certain classes and pair students with the teachers best for them.

The potential is exciting for some parents.

"I think the more we can use data to drive instruction, the better off we are," said Mary Laurens Seely, whose children are in first and third grades at Eakin Elementary. And she's not worried about security issues. "They have access to their cumulative records. It's just in various places, and now it's in one place."

Her son's teacher used Metro's database to share with her how he scored on this year's practice Tennessee Comprehensive Achievement Program exam, which revealed the boy needed to work on reading.

Florida, Texas set pace

Florida and Texas are ahead of the nation in collecting data to drive potential policy changes, said Aimee Guidera, executive director for the Data Quality Campaign, launched in 2005 by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and nine other groups. It now has 50 member organizations to encourage states' collection and use of education data. Its report featuring Tennessee was released this month.

States began paying attention to data in 2001 after passage of the federal No Child Left Behind bill, which required schools to track the progress of its subgroup populations, slicing data by race, poverty and other criteria.

Now 24 states, including Tennessee, use 10 essential elements in their data warehouse, including a statewide student identifier, student-level test data and ability to match to preschool and higher education data. The state is above average in its progress, and with access to Race to the Top funds and engagement from Tennessee politicians, it is one to watch,she said.

"Tennessee is putting together lots of good reports, but we're finding that that information is not going to parents, students, academic coaches or teachers," she said.

"Tennessee is a state to watch because it has the data, and in the next two years could be using it meaningfully in policies and shared use."