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School Business Matters: Data-Driven Investing

By Kimberly Shannon posted 11-16-2015 11:56

  

It was a pleasure to meet many of you at the SBMW this year. I hope you all enjoyed yourselves and learned a lot. Please share your thoughts with us so we know what topics to touch on for upcoming events and webinars. What was your favorite session that you attended? What was the greatest lesson that you learned? Feel free to post your input in the comments.

I know that not everyone was able to stay for the last Friday session, so I wanted to share some of my notes. I attended a workshop led by Deborah Cunningham and ONC BOCES Deputy Superintendent Jenna Bolton Carls called “ROI Analytics: Informing Strategic Resource Use.” That’s a fancy way of saying, “How to use data to drive your business decisions so you get the most bang for your buck.”

In their presentation, Deborah and Jenna used a program called Forecast5 to look at one district's data alongside other districts' and identify areas for potential change or discussion. Forecast 5 is a data analytics program that allows you to see variables from data sets such as BEDS and ST-3 and organize these into easy-to-read graphs or charts. NYSASBO has partnered with Forecast5 to increase access to data analytics for districts. You can read about the program here. You can also create many of these analytics from scratch using these same data sets, but Forecast5 makes it easy and saves you time.

During the presentation I noticed that there were really two types of questions that we were working with. The first was the question of comparability with other districts. How do your staffing ratios compare to similar districts? How do your salaries for each position compare with similar districts? How does your fund balance as a percentage of our budget compare with similar districts?

The second question is of return on investment. What investments produce the greatest results? Have your ELA scores gone up ever since you hired that new teacher and reduced class sizes? How much money have you saved since entering into that shared transportation contract? It’s helpful to even combine these types of questions and ask something like: How do your teacher salaries compare with similar districts, and are those salaries producing the results you want?

In the workshop, we chose a district and asked: How is this district achieving in comparison with its peers, and what are its higher-achieving peers doing differently?

Step 1: Identify a peer group. Using Forecast5’s Peer Finder tool, you might want to identify the factors that are beyond your control, like enrollment, ELL population, low income percentage, etc. Then you can find districts with similar characteristics. Once you’ve narrowed it down to a manageable group, say ten districts, you can save the group as a “peer group.” Peer groups are really cool because instead of just picking the districts that are close by, you can find districts all over the state that are similar to yours in ways that matter to you.

Step 2: Look for districts that are achieving at higher rates within the peer group. Look at ELA scores, Math scores, the average of all Regents scores, graduation rates, college admissions, grade point averages, etc. Are there any districts that are ranking consistently or considerably higher than your district? Note which districts those are.

Step 3: See what they’re doing differently. If you had any suspicions or if any staff has suggestions about what you could do better, look into those variables first. Maybe you want to look at teacher experience in relation to percent of low income students in each school. Are your less experienced teachers teaching in the schools with the neediest students? You could look at spending trends. How does your interscholastic and co-curricular spending compare with your peers? How about spending on teaching? How do your staffing ratios compare to your peers?

Step 4: Act on the data. Are there opportunities for resource allocation, given what you found in your research? Have you identified some questions worth asking your Board or other administrators? One of the most useful things about Forecast5 is that once you’ve designed a graph that displays the information that you need, you can export it as an image. This is helpful for Board presentations, meetings, community conversations, or your own personal use.

This is just a glimpse of what we can accomplish with data analysis. But of course, data analysis isn’t the endgame. It provides information to incorporate into your conversations; it should never solely be the basis of your decisions. If you think that a data analysis program might be helpful to you but you’re not sure where to start, give us a call or post in Connect to ask your colleagues how they use Forecast5 or other programs. I know this can all seem a bit complicated, but I think you’ll be amazed at how simple and fun it is once you get going.

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