CASE STUDY | EDUCATION

Hopkins School District

 

Hopkins Public Schools monitors and managed its strategic goals with accurate, real-time data thanks to DataDrive.

 

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Challenge

 

Hopkins Public Schools is a mid-sized public school district serving eight municipalities around Minneapolis, Minnesota. The K–12 district—which includes twelve schools, three ancillary programs, and an online program with a blended learning component—prides itself on its diverse and unique student population of more than seven thousand students. To best serve those students, though, the district knew it needed to get more data savvy.

 

“We yearned to build a strong data infrastructure to help us make sound instructional decisions,” said Dr. Rhoda Mhiripiri-Reed, the district’s superintendent. “There’s a lot that goes into meeting the individual learning needs of seven thousand different students. We want to ensure we’re looking at where every student is in terms of their literacy, numeracy, and social-emotional learning needs and then being extremely accurate in meeting those needs. So we really wanted to build a data system that would be helpful to us in those efforts.”

 

Though the district already prioritized its education data, that data was spread across multiple disparate platforms.

 

“We had our student information system, our learning management system, all of our individual assessment tools, and lots of spreadsheets, Google Forms, and Google Sheets,” Rhoda said. “We wanted all our learning and achievement data in the same place."

 

One of the district’s instructional data scientists and a few other staff members sought an organization to help pull all the district’s data together in an intelligent way, and their search led them to DataDrive.

Solution

 

The school district now relies on DataDrive’s managed analytics services to review real-time, comprehensive data about its students, classrooms, and schools.

 

“DataDrive has helped us have all our data in one spot,” Rhoda said. “Now, I can go into our reporting platform hosted by DataDrive and see how students are doing at the system level, school level, or classroom level, and I can easily manipulate and interact with the data to disaggregate and look at small group or subgroup performance.”

 

Having access to a trusted education data resource like DataDrive has also improved the workflows of many district employees.

 

“We wanted a data platform that would make work easier for our leaders and teachers,” said Rhoda. “We don’t want our teachers and school principals spending their precious time combing for the right data. To that end, DataDrive saves time and removes the cognitive lift from the work so that our leaders and teachers focus on analyzing the presented data rather than finding it and trying to piece it together for interpretation.”

 

Now that its employees can use data analytics to monitor and manage their strategic goals and track early warnings and trends, the district has seen an increase in positive student outcomes.

 

“Being able to interact with the dashboards that DataDrive offers allows us to see improvement, which comes through targeted support and targeted intervention,” Rhoda said. “When kids and teachers get what they need in real time, we see improvements in real time as we journey through a school year.”

 

However, the DataDrive team offers more than just access to easy-to-analyze data. The district also values that the team understands its unique needs across its schools.

 

“Looking at, interacting with, and making decisions about teaching, learning, and achievement data is a very specialized skill and set of experiences,” Rhoda said. “Our district benefits from a data partner like DataDrive, which offers nuanced insights and understanding into our school setting and presents the data in a way that teachers and leaders find valuable.”

Results

 
  • REAL-TIME DATA STORED IN A SINGLE PLATFORM

    Previously, the district had data stored across multiple systems, tools, and spreadsheets. Now the same data can be found, accessed, analyzed, and updated in real time in DataDrive’s managed reporting platform.

  • INFORMED DECISION-MAKING

    “DataDrive helps us make real-time instructional decisions,” Rhoda said. “We can analyze the data classroom by classroom to locate the bright spots as well as the spots that might need more support. DataDrive’s platform allows us to zoom into the classroom or the student level so we can provide targeted support or intervention or enrichment and acceleration, depending on where a student, a small group of students, or even a whole class or grade might be.”

  • CUSTOMIZABLE AND READILY AVAILABLE REPORTING FUNCTIONALITY

    District employees can view different data sets at different levels, and Rhoda notes that she can do so “every two weeks or every month instead of waiting until the end of the year and then pulling together a whole slew of summative assessments. That’s what I love about DataDrive.”

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"Schools and districts need to be data-driven and data-informed, and it’s important to partner with a data platform or organization that is well-versed in instructional and achievement data. So if another district asked me if I WOULD RECOMMEND DATADRIVE, I CERTAINLY WOULD. ”
Dr. Rhoda Mhiripiri-Reed
Superintendent