Signs of Success: Where are You on the Roadmap?
There are many stages in developing the capability to use data effectively and provide the information needed to make better decisions. Whether you’re simply generating reports for compliance, conducting longitudinal analysis, or predicting high-stakes outcomes, TetraData enables districts to build a solution at any level.
Click on a stage to see which stage best describes your district.
Stage 1: Report Results
Reporting results may answer "What happened?" Education improvement expert Larry Lezotte would refer to this stage as an "autopsy."
Notably, increasing accountability demands has resulted in districts producing tons of reports and yet very little of the information is relevant and timely to the educators of the district.
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Stage 2: Monitor Results
By monitoring results, districts employ formative assessments to "check the vital signs." Many districts have invested in assessment systems to help monitor student achievement throughout the year so that teachers can intervene in time to help these students.
This is limited because it does not paint a complete picture of all the factors impacting student achievement.
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Stage 3: Analyze Results
Districts are committed to using data to drive decisions. Your question now becomes, "Why is it happening?" You may find:
- Analysis through superhuman effort--thinking that with enough people, passion and time--you can eventually get the results.
- Inefficient use of scarce resources to manually dig the information out of multiple silos.
- Realization that your manual processes break down and will not keep up with the increasing demands for timely data.
- Overwhelmed staff.
What you may invest in is a solid information foundation with an analytical tool that considers all factors impacting student achievement — not just the activities of teachers and students. It’s a technological accelerator.
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Stage 4: Predict Results
Oftentimes districts lack knowledge on how to use the data to make significant improvements. Stage 4, Predict Results, asks "What will happen?" and combines a vision for how the whole organization impacts student achievement with a structured process on how to use data to make better decisions. Stage 4 has two components:
- First, it deploys a structured continuous improvement process from the boardroom to the classroom.
- Second, it provides a strategic roadmap— a way of organizing and prioritizing the district’s vision across the entire organization.
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Stage 5: Drive Results
Here data is aligned throughout the whole organization. Districts recognize the need and value of data at every level of the organization to sustain high performance.
At this stage, they’re going beyond traditional measures of student achievement and taking into account the desires of the stakeholders, such as:
- The parents’ perception of how welcome they feel in their children’s schools
- The business community’s expectations of what a graduate is qualified to do
- The students’ perception of how safe they feel in school
- The community’s confidence in the district using their financial resources wisely
At this stage, districts are achieving non-arbitrary goals at every part of the organization.
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