The Children's Agenda for California

Defining the goals of
The Children's Movement

Goal 5:
Establishing a comprehensive, longitudinal data system that connects early learning and development through higher education,  health, juvenile justice, child welfare and other data in order to better track and address the educational outcomes and well-being of children throughout their lives.

Specific policy components to consider:

  1. Immediately restoring CALPADS/CALTIDES funding and continuing to make progress on implementing a new, comprehensive student information system.
    The state needs to establish the governance structure and dedicated resources to support the use of data.  This includes CALPADS/CALTIDES funding and building capacity to meet seven additional requirements needed to fulfill California’s obligations that secured the state’s $4.9 billion in funding through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Currently, California only meets five of the 12 required elements. Additionally, the state should strive to attain the “10 State Actions to Ensure Effective Use of Data” identified by the Data Quality Campaign as fundamental steps to change the culture around how data is used to inform decisions and improve student outcomes; California currently meets none of the ten.

  2. Developing an early warning system for dropout prevention.
    Chronic absence, defined as a child who misses more than 10% of the school year, is an early predictor of academic distress and dropout. To support districts in combating this problem, policymakers should continue to promote the inclusion of attendance data in the new statewide student data system and advance the development of an “early warning system” to identify and address the problem at its outset.

  3. Ensuring high-quality data.
    A student information system is only as valuable as the quality of the data in it. As such, California needs to provide school districts with resources for the maintenance and reporting of data and should apply for federal dollars for data quality tools that reduce workload, minimize entry errors and automatically identify data anomalies when present.

  4. Leveraging the data to support continuous improvement of the education system.
    District-level technology plans should address the use of data from the aspects of professional development and supporting a culture of continuous improvement in student achievement. A statewide data warehouse, dashboards and useful reporting formats should be established to efficiently enable all districts to access the information they need.

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