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Hawaii’s new for students could revolutionize the way teachers prepare for school.

The only things standing in the way are training and a confidentiality agreement.

Principals already have access to the , which was promised in the state’s Race to the Top application. Civil Beat first reported about it last year. Teachers will get to use it once the Department of Education has established clear information privacy expectations for them.

Confidentiality is key, because the online dashboard will connect more than 12,500 teachers with a virtual warehouse of personal information about the state’s 170,000 public school students.

The system houses and delivers data on everything from each student’s enrollment history, demographic background and absence record to what programs they entered, dropped out of or completed. ( for a more complete summary of the data points included in the system.)

A lot of this information was already available to teachers in paper form, but the new digital form is more useful for collecting and comparing characteristics of entire classrooms, schools and even complexes.

LDS product manager Justin Katahira calls this new capability “cross-domain analysis.”

For example, a teacher could compare her students’ overall state assessment scores with the number of absences her students had in a given year. The resulting chart could show her if there is a correlation between the students’ absences and their test scores. She could do the same with family income and grades, or involvement in after-school tutoring.

“If this isn’t data overload for you all, I’d be very surprised,” Katahira told Board of Education members during a recent presentation about the new system. “This is a lot of data in here.”

The dashboard can be accessed from any computer, but for now, only Department of Education employees will have access, and will see information only about the students for which they are directly responsible.

“I think this is a very powerful, tool,” said board member Brian DeLima. “Now before the school year even starts, a teacher can get her class list and find out what the problem areas are. She can look at her students’ history of test-taking and prepare a plan of action.”

But no matter how much potential the system has, DeLima said, it won’t be effective if educators don’t know how to use it — and use it well.

Right now, as students return to classes Monday, most teachers have not seen it and don’t know the impact it will have on their day-to-day work.

“I’m not familiar with it yet,” said one teacher at an in-service training session for the Kaiser Complex last week. “We already have a paper system for that information, which includes each student’s complete background and history.”

Teachers haven’t been trained on how to use the system yet, said Debbie Arakaki, curriculum coordinator at Palolo Elementary School. That’s a fact Board of Education Chairman Don Horner wants to change as soon as possible.

“Congratulations,” he said to Katahira and Christina Tydeman, the department’s data governance expert. “This is a very powerful and important opportunity for us. When do teachers get to use it?”

“The plan is for teachers to have access this year,” Tydeman said. “As soon as possible. Technically we can turn on that capability at any time, but we’re in the process of sending memos out to schools regarding the safeguards that need to be in place, as well as setting confidentiality expectations. When we have those signed off, we’ll be able to open it up to the teachers.”

Giving teachers access is one of six actions the state must take before its system is considered effective, according to the , a national to improve the availability and quality of education data.

Another step is the Department of Education data system with one at the University of Hawaii. The result will be a comprehensive collection of information that follows students from preschool through college and beyond — the P-20 pipeline.

Hawaii developed the system with a $3.5 million grant received from the U.S. Department of Education in 2009. That’s a bargain, said the governance expert, because other states just now developing similar tools are shelling out about $10 million for them.

“We’re pulling it together with minimal resources,” Tydeman said. “Our greatest concern is ongoing sustainability, because these systems do not take care of themselves.”