Building a school data portal using open data: A description of the user research & development process

The lack of relevant and disaggregated data about schools is a challenge for organizations implementing and funders looking to invest in kindergarten through 12th-grade education programs in New York City (NYC), often forcing organizations to make critical programmatic and financial decisions with only partial or anecdotal information about schools and its existing efforts. Over the last two years, an institution of higher education and a private foundation worked together to address this problem by indexing text in thousands of annual school reports and combining multiple open data sets about schools, including geography, demographics, and academic performance, into a single database. The initial use case focused on understanding the existing computing education efforts in NYC. However, seeing the potential to inform a broader set of questions, the collaborators began exploring the utility of such data with program officers at the foundation. Interviews of program officers around their programmatic needs and challenges illuminated their struggles with analyzing scattered data, difficulty accessing non-academic data and the need for disaggregated and geographical data. These findings are being used to inform the development of a data portal that interfaces with the aggregated dataset for foundations and others interested in data about schools.