District/School Administration  Information Services
Education Data Warehouse

The Education Data Warehouse (EDW) is a collaborative effort of the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and local school districts to centralize K-12 educational performance data into one state coordinated data repository hosted by the Department. The most important facts for districts to know about the EDW are the following:

• It is free and available now.
• It already contains the SIMS and MCAS data for every district in the state.
• It will soon contain the EPIMS data for every district in the state.
• The SIMS and MCAS data moves with the student from district to district.
• Over 30 reports exist to compare data from individual schools and districts to state totals.
• Districts can load local data into the EDW and write their own reports.

The Education Data Warehouse User Guide is available for download below. Additional information and instructional documentation, including a six-course training program complete with training materials, is available to authorized EDW users on the EDW portal.

EDW Quick Tips

EDW Quick Tips    Posted 6/18/2009 Helpful hints for viewing ESE MCAS reports.

EDW User Guide

		Chapter 1  Overview and Login    Posted 12/16/2008 Step by step instructions for accessing the security portal to assign security roles and log in to the warehouse.
		Chapter 2  Security and Training    Posted 12/16/2008 This document explains the laws addressing the access and use of student data and explains the technology that protects district and state data. (For a copy of the state's Data Access Policy, see Appendix A below.) It also contains information about the newly created six-course curriculum for district users (DW101–DW302).
[1.6 MB]	[1.6 MB]	Chapter 3  Basic Access    Updated 3/6/2009 This chapter provides assistance for accessing the predefined reports and the analysis cubes. It also explains the student claiming process.
		Chapter 4  Intermediate Access    Updated 2/26/2009 This chapter provides information for district report authors. It explains security issues relevant to authoring reports and identifies helpful tips as well as pitfalls to avoid.
[1.2 MB]		Chapter 5  Advanced Access    Posted 6/5/2009 This document includes everything districts need to know about extracting, transforming, cleansing, and loading local data to the Data Warehouse.
		Appendix A  Statewide Education Data Warehouse Policy Statement  Posted 12/16/2008 A summary of the federal and state laws governing the access to data by Department and district personnel, as well as the general public.
		Appendix B  Glossary of Predefined Reports  Posted 12/16/2008 Created as part of the curriculum for DW201, Informing Instruction with Data, this document is a list of the predefined MCAS reports with detailed descriptions of what they were designed to show and how they are intended to help districts.
[2.8 MB]	[1.8 MB]	Appendix C  DW101 Handbook, Introduction to the Data Warehouse  Posted 12/16/2008 The handbook for the first course in the Department's six-course curriculum.
		Appendix D  District Extract Guides   Posted 6/5/2009 The file formats for loading local data.
		Appendix E  District Extract Guides Release Notes  Posted 6/5/2009 Changes to the District Extract Guides since the last release.
		EDW User Guide Revision History  Updated 3/6/2009 This revision history currently contains several minor changes to Chapter 4.

EDW Training

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

EDW Email Lists

The Data Warehouse Team will monitor the use of these lists and use them to send announcements about web conferences and important developments. Anyone can subscribe to them and once subscribed can email to the list with questions and to share information. It is hoped that these lists will facilitate a network of statewide support for data warehouse use.

To subscribe to any of the lists below, please send an email to imailsrv@list1.doe.mass.edu with the following text—and only this text—in the body of the message:

subscribe listname your_full_name

(e.g., subscribe edwusers john_smith).

The subject line of the email is ignored by the server.

For more information about the Education Data Warehouse, please contact the EDW Team by email or phone: 781-338-6820. For user support, please contact the Data Warehouse Contact person from your school district. A list of Data Warehouse Contacts can be found on the School/District Profiles.