For the first time, Anchorage School District data about discipline, achievement, absenteeism, and more is now easily searchable by district decision makers, and it will soon be available to the public. The administration is using the data to target problem areas and craft specific solutions.
It used to take hours to find out bits of information, like how many students received suspensions at a school, which groups are doing the best at reading, and how many kids received Fs. Now, it’s a couple of mouse clicks.
The Anchorage School District has created a searchable database, referred to as a dashboard, that makes it easy to find out specific information about how Anchorage students are doing. As Chief Academic Officer Mike Graham told the School Board during a work session on Monday, “I think this one of the biggest things we have had, biggest most valuable tools we’ve had come to us in…probably ever.”
The tool makes it easy to highlight pieces of information, like one quarter of the students at Begich Middle School have received either in-school or out-of-school suspension, and the number of students attending school 90% of the time is dropping.
But Graham said the beauty of the tool isn’t just pulling out these bits of information – it’s being able to see how the data all fit together and use that to develop solutions.
School principals already have access to the tool. Graham told the School Board that even during their initial training on how to use it, they were putting the data to work.
“Some of what they saw they were excited by. Some of it they were truly jolted by… And very concerned to be able to see it right out there. But there were already discussion going between principals about what’s happening at that school versus this school. The very things we want to have happen.”
Superintendent Deena Paramo said now that the administrators can more easily see what’s happening with their students, the district can adapt policies, grading methods, and teaching to help them.
“The mining of the data in the past was so difficult and took so much time, that the time to have to change the business of what we do– we didn’t get to,” she explained. “And so now, literally, we’re using efficiencies and technologies to answer some of the questions that we have.”
Part of the answers are spelled out in a plan to increase graduation rates that focuses on students who received Fs and have low attendance, two indicators that a student is less likely to finish school.
The plan also includes outreach to the community. Paramo said national data show that 70 percent of people who do not finish high school, never move more than 10 miles from those schools.
“So if we don’t pay attention to high school graduation rates, these students become members of our community that will find it very difficult to earn a livable wage and to participate…So it’s not just a school district, it should be all of our goals in Anchorage that we want students to graduate.”
The data dashboard will be available to the public in about six weeks. The district needs to modify it so people will not be able to identify individual students. It’s possible to narrow the data by school, gender, ethnic group, grade, and more.
Anne Hillman is the healthy communities editor at Alaska Public Media and a host of Hometown, Alaska. Reach her at ahillman@alaskapublic.org. Read more about Anne here.
