schoolstatus.com

There are many factors I’ve witnessed districts monitor, but some common ones seem to be: students below an ADA threshold, students above an infraction threshold, students failing certain classes, and also some form of demographic indicator (i.e. SPED, LEP, etc.). A couple of districts are using this benchmark information as it was intended: to identify those students in most need of intervention, and to project students’ proficiency in specific content areas. Specifically, students’ spring scores from the previous school year (Spring Term, SY 2016) are compared to students’ fall scores for the current year (Fall Term, SY 2017) to determine who regressed and who demonstrated growth. Both of these examples (using an At-Risk report and using predictive analytics to determine likelihood of advancement or regression) use their own student data to identify correlated trends in student populations in order to attempt to act proactively rather than reactively.

If you’re a parent, you know it’s true, you like talking about your kids. Bottom line, we talk about the things we love and your student’s parents will love to talk about their kids. Calling a parent early in the school year and establishing some level of trust, some connection between you and the parent is going to make the conversation in November about the failing test grade a much different one. I know when parents are involved in a student’s education, that student has a better chance at being successful.

If you have a sample size of 100 students with data suggesting that 66% of those students like to eat chocolate cake and then another sample set of 10,000 students suggesting that only 32% of students like to eat chocolate cake, the data set with the higher population will tend to be more accurate, law of large numbers and all that. and then it doesn’t (I have fewer SPED students than non-SPED students, but the student population with the most absences IS SPED students). Bringing it back to education, just because the reading scale score of your benchmark is high for all 5th graders who scored in the top performance level on your state assessment (and the scale score decreases as the performance band decreases), doesn’t mean that the scale score is a good analytic predictor of that level. One of my favorite statisticians is Nicolas Taleb who argued that while some few things may fit neatly on a bell curve (things like height, weight, calorie consumption), complex systems involving human action do not, and that those can have super extreme conditions at the ends of the distribution curve (called “tails”) that completely skew your average.

Building landing pages, organizing the layout, choosing pictures, getting employees to write their own bios (enter herding cats meme) – all of it is enough to drive a person insane. We’ve amped up our cache of support materials, and streamlined the process to schedule training online. Demonstrating in words the passion, sacrifice, sweat and tears that have gone into each and every part of SchoolStatus is nearly impossible. There’s nothing I can write here that will truly encapsulate the love and dedication that goes into SchoolStatus at each and every level.