The Rockford community is invested in building and improving its college and career pathways system from local school districts, including Belvidere CUSD #100 (D100) and Rockford Public Schools District #205 (RPS), in close partnership with Rock Valley College and other higher education and workforce entities. EdSystems has worked with regional partners since 2015 to ensure pathways align to state frameworks and offer students robust academic and work-based learning opportunities.
To understand the long-term outcomes of pathways students in the Rockford region, administrators, educators, and researchers need access to both state- and local-level data.
Our Role
In 2021, EdSystems partnered with RPS, D100, Rock Valley College, the NIU College of Education, and the NIU Illinois Interactive Report Card teams to form the Rockford Regional Education Research Collaborative. The NIU teams designed a data infrastructure that leverages both state- and local-level data to analyze the college and career pathways-related outcomes of local high school graduates enrolling at Rock Valley College.
The Rockford Regional Education Research Collaborative’s analysis is focused on cohorts of D100 and RPS high school students as they transition from high school to possible postsecondary education, and they will link secondary and postsecondary data using both locally provided data and data provisioned from state agencies participating in the Illinois Longitudinal Data System.
Analyses will describe the flow of cohort students along college and career pathways from D100 and RPS through Rock Valley College, make comparisons across academy/pathway and student subgroups, and assess relationships between pathways-related participation and academic outcomes in high school and in community college.
The Rockford Regional Education Research Collaborative is enabled through an innovative, secure, cloud-based analytical environment accessible by each partner. This environment will host data enabling the collaborative’s initial and future analyses.
