Key points:
When I talk about our district being the seventh-largest in Kentucky, with 13,000 students, people don’t have a frame of reference for what it’s like educating that many young people. But when I compare the size of our student body to the passenger count of four cruise ships, it clicks.
So imagine we’re on a voyage with thousands of students, except they’re not disembarking after a week or two. They’re with us for the long haul. As we endeavor to understand their journey of learning, one piece of data does not tell us the whole story.
Before Bullitt County Public Schools implemented a comprehensive data system, we often found ourselves looking at multiple different data sources for each individual child. We would go to one platform to look at their reading data, another for their behavior data, and yet another for math.
Likewise, one type of data is not sufficient either, so our educators consider both quantitative and qualitative reference points. For instance, we conduct empathy interviews where we talk with students and staff to find out more about their experiences. Specifically, this has allowed us to improve in closing the achievement gap for students with disabilities over the last several years and to provide our teachers with more tailored professional learning for support.
That’s just one example among many that illustrates the success we’ve had already at establishing a culture where data is prized. We look at it. We use it. We do something with it at all levels of our organization. But when educators have abundant reports that are not interconnected, they are data rich and information poor, which can result in less-than-optimal decisions. This became apparent with the implementation of assessment platforms for universal screening and diagnostic assessments, which were additional platforms we did not previously have in the district. When taking inventory of all the programs and platforms, our data was scattered everywhere like luggage on a cruise ship that had never been assigned cabin numbers–everyone’s bags were out, but no one knew where anything belonged or how to get it to the right cabin.
Academic and non-academic data allow us to see the whole child, but when the metrics are scattered across many platforms, it leads to siloed decision-making at the classroom, school, and district level. We knew that providing our teachers and principals with one place to access data in one location gives educators time back and improves their ability to make essential improvement decisions.
My role includes oversight of programs ranging from school counseling to English learning to technology, as well as curriculum implementation, instruction and assessment programming, and alignment with federal, state, and local resources. The inundation of disjointed data hit me particularly hard. It felt like I was trying to steer a massive cruise ship, but the navigation data for the engine room was on one system, the passenger manifest on another, and the weather radar on a completely different, incompatible screen.
Compliance and reporting is not the most exciting part of my job, but it has to be done and is a monumental responsibility in and of itself. Many reports require data from multiple sources to demonstrate need and program effectiveness. Manually stitching pieces of information on spreadsheets is a significant drain on time and resources–and an all-too-common struggle for leaders overseeing complex educational ecosystems.
For years, I had been on the hunt for a place where all the data about a student, from the time they enrolled in Bullitt County Public Schools to the time they graduated, could be collected from all the different sources. But not only that, the system had to be straightforward. As a deputy superintendent, I don’t have time to learn to code or handle other intensive back-end requirements. And it had to be affordable, reliable, and backed by top-tier customer service.
After we implemented our current Otus system in February 2024, I had an inkling it was different as soon as we launched access for our principals and administrators–about 35 total. We saw over 200 logins within the first month–more than anyone could have predicted–and we hadn’t even gotten to the meat and potatoes of the system yet in terms of ramping up its capabilities.
We now incorporate all our non-academic data, such as attendance, as well as comprehensive academic grades and scores from courses and testing, both current and historical. If there has been a change in a child’s trajectory, our principals and instructional coaches can look for correlations and perhaps even pinpoint factors that contribute to identifying a solution. For students who might otherwise be “invisible” due to reasonable academic progress, this system makes attendance patterns and other non-academic shifts much more visible, truly allowing us to see the “whole child” instead of just fragmented data.
We can also look on a macro level to determine where we need to focus more resources. This has brought tremendous gains in student achievement. One of the first things we noticed was a pocket of students who weren’t making progress on foundational literacy skills at the elementary level. We were able to really dig in and figure out what the problem was. We were able to see that one of our platforms was not providing us all the necessary information. We received data based on grade-level academic standard assumptions instead of the individualized foundational literacy skills students needed. We adjusted our resources, and this year, 96 percent of K-5 students met typical growth in English language arts.
When we noticed that the number of students mastering Algebra 1 concepts was not where it needed to be, we created a committee, conducted a root cause analysis, made policy changes, and will be implementing more robust professional learning and consistent high-quality instructional resources in all middle schools.
Our next steps will be equally exciting. We recently gathered real-time data and feedback that provided us insights on our Professional Learning Community process. The results indicated the need for a system-level adjustment, and that will be part of our ongoing building phase as we add teachers as users in our software going forward.
Had we not consolidated our data in a single system, our reliance on siloed and incomplete information could have left some of our 13,000 students adrift. Now we are more confident than ever that when they eventually walk down the gangway at graduation, they will be thoroughly prepared for their new destination.
This post is exclusively published on eduexpertisehub.com
Source link
