Many school systems are challenged to effectively integrate data from disparate sources into a coherent, meaningful repository that can support reporting and analysis. Schools face a proliferating array of data systems with varying degrees of interoperability and many organizations have limited capacity to integrate and manage the resulting data. This results in data silos that prevent leaders from having a holistic view of their schools’ progress and the ability to pinpoint areas of strength and opportunities for improvement.
Exponent builds data warehouses and interactive dashboards to ensure that leaders have command of the data they need to drive improvement.
Community stakeholders — from parent organizers in the church basement to legislators in the state house — need the ability to explore, compare, and uncover detail about the performance of public schools. Exponent designs custom data dashboards that integrate publicly available, but otherwise inaccessible, data into an intuitive, interactive format.
Exponent works with student- and teacher-level data to uncover patterns and lift up insights related to major educational milestones, including early literacy, middle grades math, college and career preparation, and postsecondary outcomes.
All districts must have a solid diagnostic analysis of the landscape and geography of school effectiveness. Exponent is experienced in connecting data on schools’ enrollment, performance and capacity to drive a regional learning journey or portfolio planning process aimed at expanding access to high-performing schools for students of all backgrounds and in every neighborhood.
A growing body of comparative school effectiveness research over the past decade has made clear that there are significant differences in schools’ ability to raise achievement, both within and across districts, and that school effectiveness can be improved and replicated. Exponent utilizes value-added modeling to estimate the contributions of individual schools to student outcomes, enabling districts to isolate the unique impacts of each school in its system.
Schools need comparative data to set goals and learn from outliers. Exponent builds tools that norm and compare student outcomes data across a range of domains to equip leaders with information about student progress beyond the walls of their schools.
Educators need to know which interventions work to raise student achievement and which don’t. Unfortunately, too often programs are expanded - or discontinued - with little insight about their effectiveness. Exponent has estimated the impact of dozens of interventions using quasi-experimental research designs that leverage large administrative datasets to overcome typical challenges to program evaluation, like selection and attrition bias, unobserved variables and other confounders.
To promote the learning and well-being of all students, equity measurement in education must go beyond crude differences in subgroup proficiency rates, which can mask significant variation in results. Exponent cuts student performance data a number of ways to uncover stratified access to resources and disproportionality in outcomes.
A school performance framework synthesizes multiple measures of student and school success into a holistic view of school quality. When built well, they strategically align networks of schools on a small number of shared outcomes and guide the supports and interventions that affect a system of schools. Exponent has developed or evaluated frameworks in multiple settings: at the state level, for large districts, and for small networks.
Exponent’s founder, Steve, has trained hundreds of education analysts and researchers in data visualization, program evaluation and information design. He is a faculty instructor with the Strategic Data Project at Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research.
