In late May, 20 states received Longitudinal Data System grants from Recovery Act funds in order to improve the quality and use of educational data.

We got curious about how this was likely to work, and looked into Minnesota, which received the full $12.4 million it had requested. As Commissioner of Education Alice Seagren (pictured) told us, “We think the data is very important to improve school infrastructure that leads to closing the achievement gap."

How exactly does the state intend to use the money? Cathy Wagner, Director of Information Technology for the Department of Education, explains: “We need to do some pretty large infrastructure upgrades so [the new information system] doesn't burden districts with data collections.” The state is planning for three big tasks:

· Upgrading its preschool-12 data collection system.

· Building up a second data warehouse; an inter-agency warehouse that will hold pre-K-through-20 data, which will allow the state to link students’ pre-K-12 education with their post-secondary education and eventually labor force information.

· Finally, it is building up the state’s analytic capacity--dashboards of more easily digestible performance data--in order to make the most of those two new warehouses.

This all sounds great. But it’s not so easy. Just getting consensus for the plans was difficult. The state needed to have a basic data agreement among a number of agencies, including of course the Department of Education, with perhaps the most important component being a single student identification number that follows the student. Furthermore, these agencies needed to develop a governance structure in order to sustainably manage all of the new data, and the broad privacy, security, technology, and research concerns that attend that data collection.

The data agreement came together in January. Next step was legislative approval, which required strong assurances that whenever aggregate data were used for research or other purposes, privacy would be strongly protected.

Safeguarding those assurances and the privacy of all the students—not to mention collecting and using the data over time—required a broader understanding among the agencies and stakeholders involved. “We wanted to create something that would create sustainability and maintain this data collection process,” says Commissioner Seagren. The state created a governance structure—a process and a point of inquiry and operational control—that could make decisions about adding data elements, or answering research study questions.

Minnesota plans on using some of the money to support “softer” skills training for teachers to be able to use the new data systems effectively. “We can have the most sophisticated data system in the world,” adds Wagner, “but if it isn't used productively it isn't worth the money."