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How Uplift Education, a Texas-based charter network, uses data to set goals and catalyze school improvement.

At Panorama, we are proud to partner with innovative educators who are using data to create school change and improve student outcomes. Rich Harrison, Chief Academic Officer of Uplift Education, a public charter network in the greater Dallas-Fort Worth area, shares how Uplift has leveraged a culture of data-driven improvement to help teachers develop their teaching practice and measure student growth.

Here’s what Rich Harrison has to say about how educators and administrators can promote a culture of data-driven inquiry and improvement in their schools:

1. Pick your goals Before thinking about what you want to measure, you have to decide what you want to accomplish in the next year, two years, five years, ten years. To make meaningful changes in your community, you need to have a vision of what success looks like before starting to collect data. We spent years developing a strategic plan with a clear set of goals. Those goals shape all of our work with our students, staff, and families. One of our priorities has been to help students improve their ACT scores so that they are able to get into four-year colleges, because we have found that our students are more likely to persist in four-year college programs.

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About Uplift Education

• Serves 14,000 students

• 34 schools across

Elementary, Middle and

High School levels

• Based in the greater

Dallas-Fort Worth area

• Focused on preparing

low-income students

for college

10 Strategies for Creating a Culture of Data-Driven Improvement

Figure 1 - Uplift’s students have an overall ACT score of 21.7. Tracking ACT scores is not only a critical part of helping students get into four-year colleges, but also indicates college readiness. The figure to the right shares the percentage of students above “selective college readiness” (score of a 23) by tenure at Uplift Schools, with blue representing 3+ years at Uplift, and yellow representing less than 3 years.

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2. Choose metrics that matter. The metrics that you choose should be related to your vision of what success looks like in your school or district. As we thought about what great school experiences would look like for our staff, families and students, we came up with five goals and related metrics that would help us measure progress towards those goals: student academic growth, teacher retention, successful adoption of the IB and AP programs, student persistence over multiple years, and college readiness. If we are hitting our targets in each of those five areas, we know we’re heading in the right direction.

3. Keep your data clean. It’s very hard to do anything with your data, including sharing it with your faculty and staff, unless your database is up-to-date. Investing in your data will allow you to be more ambitious in the work that you do with it, and will give you better insight into how your students and staff are doing now and in the future.

4. Create a culture of sharing and mutual support. Because discussing data in group settings can be challenging, we work hard to make sure that our faculty and staff understand why sharing data is valuable. We organize faculty into grade-level and content area sections and have them look at their student data together. Because they’re all looking at similar data, it’s easier for them to share strategies and focus on what matters: helping students grow and develop. As we look at the data together, we emphasize the outcomes that we want to see, and reinforce why it’s important to track progress towards those goals.

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Figure 2 - Uplift has a dashboard that tracks progress on the metrics that they have chosen to focus on. Level 4 indicates whether the goal is being met fully. The dashboard also looks at how well individual schools are meeting these goals.

Figure 3 - 95% of Uplift scholars are accepted to four-year college programs. Because persistence in four-year college programs is considerably higher, Uplift has made getting students into four-year programs a priority.

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5. Set aside time. We believe it’s critical to look at data in small and large groups, so we’ve established days every quarter for our faculty and staff to convene and discuss data together. These days are important to remind faculty and staff of shared goals and priorities and cement the kind of open, supportive culture we are aiming to maintain. Faculty and staff know when those days will be and can connect with colleagues without giving up time with their students.

Figure 4 - On a survey of 910 staff members, Uplift staff ranked Uplift highly as a good place to work. Creating cultures of sharing and mutual support promotes camaraderie and pride.

6. Establish growth targets. Each student has a personal growth target for improving his/her test scores in every core content area. We’ve found that establishing these goals for students empowers them to be more equal partners in their own learning, because they know what they need to be working on and can strategize with their teachers about how to meet those goals. Teachers actively communicate and monitor goals with students, but students are ultimately the owners of their personal goals.

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Figure 5 - Closely tracking students’ growth rates on MAP (Measures of Academic Progress) and pass rates on STAAR (Texas academic exams) allows Uplift to determine whether and how much students are improving over time by national quintile groups.

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7. Track progress. We constantly track students’ progress towards meeting their growth targets. Because the goals are clear and we know what success in meeting those goals looks like, it’s easier for us to predict whether students will meet their targets. As a network, we define our success partially through whether our students are meeting their growth targets. If we’re not meeting those targets as a network, we know we need to give our students and faculty more support.

Figure 6 - Uplift establishes growth targets centrally for students (usually to achieve 1.5 times their original score in each core content area) and works with teachers and students to help them meet them.

8. Make data visible. In order for data to be useful, people have to be able to see it. We’ve built dashboards using Tableau ® (a business intelligence software that produces interactive data visualization) accessible by teachers and principals on our intranet that track student achievement towards their growth targets, so that faculty have an up-to-date sense of how close to or far from meeting those targets students are. Ideally, faculty and staff should be interacting with data on a regular basis: it’s important to work with your faculty and staff to present the data in a way that makes it easy for them to take next steps.

9. Promote buy-in. We want our students and teachers to know that their voices and experiences are a critical part of creating the school experiences we want them to have. We work with Panorama to learn more about what’s happening with school culture and how students feel about social-emotional indicators. Getting this kind of stakeholder feedback—and matching it to our data about student achievement, attendance, and behavior—gives us deeper insight into how to help our students and faculty grow and develop.

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Figure 7 - Uplift works with Panorama to collect feedback data from students on social-emotional learning topics like grit and sense of belonging. Uplift’s leadership team monitors the results of these measures and analyzes the data across other key indicators in the network. Last year’s pilot will be expanded to all Uplift scholars this year— more than 14,000 students.

10. Find resources to support continued learning. While there are great resources within the education world, and I spend a lot of time learning from other charter networks and education outlets, I’ve been blown away by the amazing work with data that is happening outside of education. I’ve been learning about how hospitals use data to track patient progress, and as a big sports fan, I like thinking about what we can learn from sports analytics that can be applied to education. Studying the use of data in other industries can help us be more creative and apply new practices to better improve student outcomes and prepare students for college and beyond.

All of these fields are working on the same questions we are: what metrics allow us to predict success? How can we do a better job of using data to track improvement? Learning from other fields is an opportunity for me to challenge myself, and hopefully I can better support my colleagues in building the stronger academic experiences we want our students to have.

We used Panorama's SEL measures in five topics last year. In this pilot, we found all five SEL topics had a positive relationship with student growth and performance on MAP and ACT scores. This relationship was strongest with Grit. This year, we will use the SEL measures with all of our students in grades 3-12 to better understand how social-emotional learning can be used as a lever to improve school culture, academic performance, and college readiness and persistence.” Rich Harrison - Chief Academic Officer, Uplift Education

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Panorama Education - Panorama Education partners with schools, districts, charter networks, and state departments of education to design and implement survey programs for students, families, and teachers. Panorama offers a technology platform to support survey administration and create reports that are clear, actionable, and, most importantly, help teachers and administrators improve their schools. Panorama currently runs survey programs in over 6,500 schools in 35 states, including those in the Connecticut State Department of Education, San Francisco Unified School District, Dallas Independent School District and Teach for America.

Rich Harrison - After serving as the founding Middle School Director for the Denver School of Science and Technology (DSST), Rich Harrison joined Uplift Education in 2011 to lead the Teaching and Learning Team. Rich graduated from the University of Chicago and taught middle and high school English in New York City and Denver for seven years. His first leadership role was as a principal and English teacher for KIPP: Cole College Prep, which was the first conversion charter school in US. In addition to working as the Chief Academic Officer of Uplift Education, Rich is the managing director of three school sites in the network.

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