D.C.’s State Superintendent’s Office is signing a $12 million contract to create a comprehensive database that tracks the District’s students across all levels of their schooling, according to D.C. Council documents.
It’s a plan that’s been in the works all year and is described by officials as critical to understanding when students drop out and how they transfer between public, charter and private schools.
The proposed contract amounts to $11.84 million spent over three years. Officials first put the project out for bid in the fall. After whittling through proposal requests, the agreed-upon firm is Williams, Adley & Co., which has an office in D.C.
The 25-year-old company is one of the nation’s premier certified public accounting and management consulting firms.
For years, D.C. has lacked any central information source for tracking enrollment, graduation, demographics and postsecondary participation.
The database that’s being created will serve in this robust capacity, according to John Stokes of the superintendent’s office.
“It’s sorely needed,” Stokes told The Examiner. “We’ll be able to tell where and why student achievement has occurred and pinpoint the educational experiences of children in the District. Then we can tell when curriculum is working and not working. For the first time, we’ll have a factual basis on which to make educational policy.”
Another application of the system will be to assess which teachers have had positive and negative effects on their students’ performance so as to compensate them financially, officials have said.
Nationally, there’s been a big push over the past five years to track students’ longitudinal data. As of November, 26 states had or were working on building warehouses, according to the Data Quality Campaign.
