Best Practices Case Studies

Community Consolidated School District 15 (CCSD 15)/Ill.
(www.ccsd15.net)

Name: Community Consolidated School District 15
Location: Palatine, Illinois, northwest of Chicago
Enrollment: 13,000 students

Located in Palatine, Illinois, in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, Community Consolidated School District 15 uses the Baldrige Award performance criteria as a framework for self-assessing organizational progress. The district serves 13,000 students with 14 elementary schools, three junior high schools, a K-8 school, a special education school, and a newcomer's school.

In 1990, the CCSD 15 hired Bob Ewy as Director of Planning to make operational the strategic plan throughout the organization. The district always collected data, but now it is tied to organizational goals and available for decision makers.

District 15 partnered with a corporate vendor to design an Educational Data Warehouse (EDW) to address data and information needs that support continuous improvement in student achievement. Through a discovery process, district staff identified 20 questions about student performance that the EDW should be able to answer. These questions became the focus of the data design and acquisition, guiding the development and deployment processes as well.

The EDW enables district decision makers to access data instantly and securely via the Internet, scan existing reports, and employ easy-to-use tools to discover, analyze, and mine data themselves. The EDW is populated with carefully chosen and cleansed (validated) data from files (electronic and paper) that were once scattered throughout the district. Query software makes access possible to 349 different variables in the database. Data reports correlate attendance to achievement, track enrollment histories, disaggregate all test results by subgroup performance, report survey, and give this information in trend strings of at least three years. Data can be drilled from the district level to the school to the individual child. Individual child data can be grouped into cohorts, subgroups, or analyzed by applying a number of possible variables to get a true picture of performance over time.

The district uses EDW to make program improvement decisions, for trend analysis, and to develop school improvement plans.

• Using analysis of second grade reading performance, the district developed kindergarten, first, and second grade early literacy intervention programs. Ninety-two percent of English readers and 95% of Spanish readers are reading at or above grade level by the end of second grade.
  
  
• When the district set a goal of generating enthusiasm for reading, they identified library circulation as an indicator. Since CCSD15 leaders initiated their reading programs, library circulation has increased 600%, and the district has a rationale to add staff to handle the circulation increase and expand the collection.
  
  
• Teachers find that electronic diagnostic tools save time and provide a leading indicator to measure the effectiveness of particular lessons. A teacher schedules the laptop cart and selects a valid diagnostic tool from a web-based assessment program. The electronic tests are scored and entered automatically with feedback for both students and teachers. They immediately know how effective the lesson was and whether or what individual instruction a student may need.
  
  

Each year, CCSD15 delivers a "Shareholder's Report" to every household in the community. In addition to measuring instructional effectiveness, this also includes satisfaction data about support services such as transportation, safety and food services.

CCSD15 Improvement Process

• Set measurable goals and targets
• Collect data using electronic methods
• Deliver information to decision makers (classroom, building, district)
• Clearly identify levels of performance and opportunities for improvement
• Use benchmarking to manage the change process