Implement, Improve and Expand Your Statewide Longitudinal Data System: Creating a Culture of Data in Education

Foreword

How do today’s educators teach the necessary skills for tomorrow’s skilled workforce? How do we find and reward effective teachers? How do we maximize the diminishing resources available to schools to make them more successful? These are just a few of the pressing and difficult questions facing our educational system today.

Although I am not an educator, I have been privileged to be directly involved in more facets of the educational process than most business leaders, as a student, professor, parent and developer of educational software. On a personal level, my early years as a student were shaped by a high school teacher who encouraged me to pursue science. And shortly after earning my Ph.D. in statistics and teaching the subject at the graduate level, my career was again influenced by my department head and other university leaders, who encouraged several of us to continue our work outside the university, as entrepreneurs. We took their advice and started a company called SAS.

As SAS grew, so too did our need for highly qualified knowledge workers. We needed people who could quickly adapt our software to new computer processors and new architectures, and required graduates with STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) skills and a strong education. By the 1990s, we realized that there was a problem: The supply of highly specialized workers coming out of the U.S. educational system was not enough to meet the demand. After a closer look, we were shocked to see ...