Driven By Data

Charter renewal is a critical process for schools, demanding meticulous planning and a deep understanding of key performance areas defined by the charter authorizer. In Baltimore City, the process is especially rigorous, requiring schools to demonstrate clear performance and alignment across three domains: Student Achievement, School Climate, and Financial Management & Governance. 

EdOps supported Baltimore Montessori Public Charter School’s (BMPCS) effective use of data during the recent successful renewal application. In EdOps Lab conversation with Megh Rennard, Executive Director BMPCS, we uncovered several strategies other schools can use to set themselves up for success. Read on for five takeaways to help any Baltimore charter school prepare for a strong renewal submission.

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The Louisiana Department of Education's October CLASS submission is mandatory and vital for state funding, but requires extensive staff data often held outside the SIS. This playbook provides Louisiana schools with five key, proactive steps—from unifying HR and staffing data to clearing ADQs and verifying rosters—to dramatically reduce administrative burden and ensure a complete, accurate, and error-free submission before the January 15th deadline.

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The DC Public Charter School Board (DC PCSB) uses the ASPIRE framework to make school oversight decisions. DC charter school leaders, in turn, can use this data to understand their impact on student outcomes and identify areas for improvement. Read on to understand what ASPIRE is all about.

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It's budget season which means we are looking closely at costs for next year. If you are reeling from sticker shock after speaking to your vendor partners, take solace that you are not alone.

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Our student data team partnered with the Maryland Alliance of Public Charter Schools to develop a series of webinars and accompanying tools aimed at supporting school leaders in identifying and effectively communicating their school’s success story using data.

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Planning for how to address the COVID slide, or even a COVID slowdown, is challenging given the undefined path of the next few months, but one thing that is certain is that data will play a more critical role than ever in efficiently and effectively planning to make up for lost time and learning. The key questions many are looking to answer – which data to use, when to collect the data, and what to do with the data. While no consensus has been reached, a number of ideas and strategies are emerging that capture how schools plan to use current and future data to attack this learning slide.

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A successful first day of school begins months before the first day of classes. Schools with strong data practices typically begin initial Student Information System (SIS) planning and preparation during the spring of the prior school year. A staff member or team coordinates the completion of major tasks so that the student information system is ready for use by the first day of school. We recommend this sample timeline to get you started and highlight four things that can derail these plans.

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This the second of our two-part series on best practices in board governance over academic performance. Part 1 focused on the responsibilities of an academic performance committee and the importance of creating a calendar around reviews of school performance. In this post, we delve further into how strong boards review school performance, as well as common metrics and visualizations that can help boards easily understand their student performance data. A board’s goal should look for ways to understand the trends in academic performance throughout the year, not just in a once-per-year snapshot when state assessment results are published.

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As recommended by Education Board Partners in Standards for Effective Charter School Governance, the top priority of effective boards should be to ‘focus relentlessly on student achievement.’ Schools are in the business of providing top-notch education to students, and school boards should prioritize this principle in their work.

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As a follow-up to last week’s post on strategies for improving attendance, this week we have a short post with suggested roles for everyone involved in the attendance management process. Defining roles is a key step in establishing your school-wide attendance plan.

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The pathway to strong school attendance begins at the end of the previous school year and goes through September. Establishing an attendance plan during this time sets the foundation for the school year and is critical in forming positive habits toward meeting your annual attendance goals.

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Throughout the year OSSE and PCSB ask schools to “validate” a number of student data points – from re-enrollment rates to PARCC achievement subgroup scores. Schools are asked to review and certify certain groups of data in OSSE’s or PCSB’s databases and confirm their accuracy (versus the school’s internal records). While data validation can feel daunting, making a roadmap at the beginning of the school year allows you to streamline validation task management during the school-year when there are so many competing priorities.

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Schools are taking more assessments than ever before. While the output and data from assessments vary – RIT scores and percentiles from NWEA MAP or a percent score from Achievement Network – common challenges exist for school leaders, regardless of the exam. School leaders are all aiming to create meaning from student scores and put interim scores in context with end-of-year outcomes. This post identifies one method (of many) that will help leaders make sense of current assessment results and what they imply about end-of-year outcomes.

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Data systems are great at making our schools run more efficiently… right up until a grade is missing on a report card or a student can’t log in on test day. As the web of interconnected systems grows in size and complexity, keeping your data clean and orderly is just as important as any software upgrade.

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Assessment data comes in fast throughout the year and provides multiple opportunities for all stakeholders to learn about the performance of a school. With so many ways to slice the data, it can be difficult to identify the most important stories.

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