SVRDT brings together data from numerous public agencies that service children and families, including Education (public school districts), Public Health, Child and Family Services, Mental Health, Juvenile Justice/Probation, and Education Technology companies.
The current siloed state of education, social services, and other data systems involving children, coupled with unresolved privacy and trust issues, results in both incomplete and fragmentary analysis of complex problems and disjointed service delivery facing all children, but especially for children of poverty.
A well-managed regional data trust will provide a comprehensive understanding of factors contributing to student failure and success.
By applying advanced data analytics, SVRDT will create a personal blueprint for students that clarifies the myriad factors influencing their lives and from that to improve the effectiveness of services and academic outcomes.
As a research center of the University of California, Santa Cruz, SVRDT has also gained support from the National Science Foundation.
Student Centered
SVRDT exists to serve students. We believe that improved educational outcomes for children, especially for children from underserved communities, two approaches must be combined:
- Personalization of learning/teaching: supported by analysis of large-scale data sets that include data from public agencies (including education) serving children and families, non-profit organizations serving children, and for-profit providers of educational resources and services.
- The 70% solution: which acknowledges that most factors affecting the academic performance of children/youth in schools lie outside of school. As a result, children/youth can better engage personalized learning opportunities when they are supported by effective, coordinated services/programs across multiple community agencies.
Data Driven
SVRDT believes that both personalizing learning and improving services to children of poverty can be informed by the mining and analysis of large-scale data, shared across agencies throughout the region. Analyzing data from public agencies improves the effectiveness of services and allocation of resources for individual agencies. It also enhances coordination of services across agencies.
Institutionalized Trust
Institutionalized Trust is the fundamental principle behind our Regional Data Trust, which is a formal entity requiring a stable structure of agreements and data governance policies that exist beyond the individuals within each agency and provide coherent access.
The SVRDT supports data sharing among county agencies, school districts, non-profits and educational technology firms to inform regional policy, practice, and research.
SVRDT works with regional advisors to create a network that makes it possible for SVRDT members to share knowledge, enabling us to scale and apply research, resource sharing and process integration across multiple policy and program areas.
Privacy Advocates
SVRDT is keenly aware of and sensitive to the privacy issues involving data sharing among multiple public agencies with regard to students and their families. To build the strongest dataset possible, SVRDT is meeting with key players in the region and with expert legal counsel from Stewards of Change, DLA Piper and the University of Albany’s Center for Technology in Government, to discuss the fundamental requirements for establishing an interoperable data-sharing environment. Based on this expert counsel, wSVRDT will develop guidelines for the Regional Data Trust that define and govern what is allowable under privacy regulations such as FERPA, HIPAA and COPPA and will develop data sharing agreements that accordingly protect students’ privacy and confidentiality.
Personalized Learning
SVRDT is pioneering the integration of cutting-edge database, search and privacy technologies with rapidly evolving social media sharing mechanisms to create an interoperable data management platform that enables deep, personalized learning for all students. This responsive platform will support trustworthy data sharing and learning activities across networks of agencies, youth, parents, and educators to enhance student engagement and learning outcomes.
Research Focused
SVRDT brings together multidisciplinary teams from UCSC to conduct research to understand human and social factors that influence learning, to advance technologies that facilitate learning, and to develop data-analytic techniques applicable to education. In addition, University-based researchers partner with private firms to design and develop instructional, social, and data-analytic systems that together provide architectures for personalized learning. The goal of SVRDT research is to inform how data shared among agencies best serves to support student-personalized learning options.
Collaborative Development
SVRDT believes that our success can only be achieved through expanded collaboration and communication among all of the regional government agencies, educations providers, private sector companies, foundations, and other youth-serving non-profits. SVRDT will organize the energies and contributions of all RDT stakeholders to support coordinated action and information sharing. We will also create processes for selecting, controlling, and evaluating initiatives across these networks at an enterprise level. And we will build a new level of trust and understanding that support improved educational outcomes for children, and especially for children from underserved communities.
256
Local Agencies
27
Districts
267000
Students
5,000,000+
Data Points