What are people saying about Advanced Analytics for Child Welfare Administration?
BIG NEWS! Our next Advanced Analytics course is scheduled for November 17-20, 2015. We’ll announce the call for applications in the next few weeks. In the meantime:
- Read on below to hear what former students have to say about the course.
- Make sure you get the call for applications by signing up for the Data Center’s newsletter.
- Click here to learn more about the curriculum.
“Participating in Advanced Analytics was an invaluable professional development experience. The course opened my eyes to how I was looking at data. I am now much more critical of information presented to me and I can make more informed decisions from available information. For example, during Advanced Analytics, I became acutely aware of my agency’s dependence on ‘point-in-time’ data and the limitations of those types of analyses. I also became more aware of our focus on improving task compliance and the fact that we often don’t spend enough time looking at the big picture of permanency outcomes. While we still have a tremendous amount of ‘point-in-time’ information, we are now examining entry cohort data and setting baselines and targets for performance to learn about the effectiveness of our new interventions under the IV-E waiver. Advanced Analytics help me build those skills. Increasing leadership knowledge on analyzing child welfare data is essential to effective decision making. I definitely recommend Advanced Analytics to all senior managers and quality managers in child welfare. It is absolutely essential to understanding child welfare data.”
Christina M. Fly
Director of Policy and Continuous Quality Improvement
Tennessee Department of Children’s Services
“Advanced Analytics creates a completely different mindset for both data professionals and child welfare leadership—it gave our agency a completely different perspective on how our data could be used. As a result, we have been able to turn data collected in our system into usable information that actually has the capacity to impact practice and directly change people’s lives. The longitudinal model taught in Advanced Analytics is virtually data agnostic in that it is not necessarily tied to any specific measurements, data elements, or CQI-related questions. Therefore, it lends itself to usage across a wide range of business functions. I would definitely recommend this class to other child welfare professionals. It would be most beneficial to data professionals such as senior analysts, program administrators, CQI leadership, and even partnered university data analysts and researchers.”
Marvin L. Smith
Programs Administrator, Technology & Governance Unit – KIDS (SACWIS)
Child Welfare Services, Oklahoma Department of Human Services
“The value of Advanced Analytics is that it improves participants’ understanding of the underlying structure of how we look at and use administrative data in child welfare. What I really valued was that the coursework gave me a new perspective on the federal Child and Family Service Review (CSFR) metrics. When you’re looking at those outcomes, you have to have a good understanding of how they are being generated and how that ultimately affects the findings that you’re looking at. The knowledge I gained from Advanced Analytics absolutely, positively helped me to understand the CSFR outcomes, what it was that we had control over and what we didn’t have control over, and how I can best inform my agency in terms of where we wanted to spend our limited energy and resources. That, to me, was extraordinarily helpful. As a private child welfare agency, I have to understand this.”
Lynn Castrianno
Director, CQI and Data Management
Nebraska Families Collaborative