Strategic Data Services

BPE's bottom line is student learning. With that in mind, we have developed a suite of data tools and services that help school teams monitor students’ progress and make evidence-based decisions about instruction, student support, and school climate that lead to better student outcomes.

Schools are often inundated with data, but these data are located in multiple places and can be difficult and time-consuming to access. We take the extra work out of the process and make sure teachers and administrators have the best available data—in a form they can use—to guide decisions about what they teach and how they support students.

Our school-based data analysts act as problem-solvers, working with our school partners to dig deeper into student data and devise solutions to overcome challenges. We support schools in building strong and sustainable data cultures that increase their capacity to make data-driven decisions.

We offer support in these strategic areas:

With the right data in hand, we help schools focus on two questions, again and again: Will this help students?  What's our evidence?

 

Using Data to Guide Instruction

We provide schools with a variety of assessment data (MCAS, diagnostic and formative assessments) to reveal trends in student performance. These frequent analyses help school staff to track each student’s progress, understand remaining challenges, and devise solutions that bring students closer to their goals.

We help build teachers' familiarity with assessments so they understand what various data are telling them about what students have learned and what they still need to learn. We also help teachers to collect their own data to guide their daily decisions about teaching.

All of these data become part of the school’s feedback loop, informing school-wide planning, and helping teachers decide what to teach, when, and to which students. The result is a more coherent, schoolwide approach to instruction and better learning outcomes for all.

 

Intervening with Early Warning Indicators

Research shows that attendance, behavior, and course grades (the ABCs) are early predictors of who will drop out. By using these indicators to intervene early, schools can put more students on a path to graduation.

BPE’s data team provides schools with regular attendance reports, course grades analyses, and other behavioral data, helping them to pinpoint students in need of support and assign appropriate interventions, such as mentoring or a home visit. We then help staff develop an action plan and provide tools to help staff track progress of students and the effectiveness of interventions. With surveys and focus groups, we get beneath the hard numbers to learn from the experiences of students, staff, and families.

We also provide tools that help middle and high school students track their own progress toward graduation.

By looking at behavioral data in tandem with academic data, we help schools get to the root of student performance patterns and use their time and specialized resources more effectively.       

 

Building School Capacity in Data Literacy 

Successful schools use data to stay focused on student outcomes. We understand, though, that not all educators have had opportunities to develop their technical skills collecting, manipulating, and interpreting data. BPE offers workshops and guides that help teachers get comfortable using Microsoft Excel, visualizing data, and administering and interpreting assessments. We coach groups and individuals to develop action plans based on what they learn.

We are always improving our trainings based on input from participants and have had overwhelmingly positive feedback on the usefulness of our support. Our goal is that staff can eventually do much of this work independently. To that end, we provide protocols and coaching to help staff plan and facilitate conversations about data on their own.

 

Communicating Data to the School Community

Learning-focused schools engage the whole school community—teachers, students, families, and partners—with data. The BPE data team helps school to create eye-catching public data displays, staff data walls that track each student's progress, individualized reports for students and families, and weekly news blasts that communicate progress on key goals.

These tools and others generate momentum toward improvement goals and keep everyone accountable for better student outcomes.