When Oak View Elementary School Principal Debbie Lane discovered her fourth-graders were struggling to pass a state-mandated exam on social studies skills, she didn't panic; instead, she turned to her computer, and the district's data warehouse, for answers.

The results were encouraging. Though students in Oak View were struggling, their counterparts in other schools across the district actually were performing well on the test, many even exceeding expectations, results showed.

Rather than scrap the school's entire approach to teaching social studies and start over from scratch, Lane and her curriculum people instead used the data they culled from the district's information system to reach out to schools that reportedly posted higher marks on the same test, exchanging best-practice solutions and asking for advice about how to improve the situation in Oak View.

"We looked around at the other schools in our neighborhood ... and said, 'OK, these two schools did fantastic,' so we went and met with the teams over at these other schools," Lane said. "What we found out was that they were using plays, songs, [and] working with art on specific objectives featured on the history test."

After observing these and other seemingly effective teaching methods, Lane and her team returned to Oak View, where they put what they'd learned into practice.

"The next year, we scored 97 percent on the same test," she said, "which is unbelievable."

Lane attributes much of the success to her staff's ability to find and replicate effective approaches being used in other schools around the district--a feat she says would have been difficult to accomplish were it not for FCPS's Education Decision Support Library (EDSL), a customized data warehousing and reporting tool developed by engineers in the district's Department of Instructional Technology.

Oak View is not alone. Across the district, administrators and teachers in more than 240 school buildings and offices use the system daily to help gauge student progress and measure academic success under NCLB.

One of the largest educational databases of its kind in the country, district officials say, EDSL reportedly contains some 18 million student records. The password-protected system enables approved administrators to perform school- and district-wide data searches, sort class and individual student performance data, and create color-coded graphs and other visual aides to determine how well schools are performing--and where they must improve--to be on par with state and federal guidelines.

"The reports you can get from EDSL are massive," said Terri Newman, a former science teacher, whose role as Oak View's School-Based Technology Specialist (SBTS) charges her with making sure teachers and faculty understand the technology. "It's incredible the amount of data you can access."

By enabling teachers to pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of individual students, Lane said, Fairfax County's data warehouse--and the specially designed reporting tools that accompany it--give administrators the power to make more informed decisions, a necessity in the new era of accountability created by NCLB.