In many school districts, each school often operates independently, leading to a fragmented understanding of the district's overall performance. This separation can create dangerous silos where students may struggle without anyone noticing. In the post-COVID era, as many schools are trying to recover from setbacks, it is crucial to clearly understand each school's situation and the district's challenges. This understanding can be key to ensuring overall student success.
Recent reports from NPR highlight the growing emphasis on data analysis and collection in education, with Louisiana's focus on reading and Alabama's efforts in math serving as compelling examples.
In Louisiana, the superintendent of Natchitoches Parish School District told NPR that there was little cohesion within the district—"each of the district's 14 schools was doing its own thing." However, a goal to have all schools have the same expectations was key to improving reading scores, and to do so, a baseline needed to be set by visualizing student data. This improved their rank from 50th in 4th-grade reading to 16th between 2019 and 2025.
In Alabama, the DeKalb County School District prioritizes data by encouraging everyone—from teachers to administrators—to review student data constantly, per the NPR article.
The district is now using data to monitor each student's performance and to identify when they are encountering difficulties. This data also helps uncover patterns related to issues at the classroom and school levels, such as snow days or teacher absences.
Both states share a central theme regarding their dependence on standardized assessments as primary indicators of student proficiency. Louisiana monitors reading scores after introducing new curricula, while Alabama focuses on math performance through student data. These are examples of how important it is to have a holistic view of your school district and visualize metrics in real time.
The real value of this data comes not only from the scores themselves but also from breaking down and analyzing the information to identify trends and disparities. By examining how different student groups perform, educators and policymakers can identify areas where interventions are most needed, addressing potential equity gaps early on.
How Standard Education Can Help Break Data Silos
With Standard Education, educators can track student progress on key metrics in real-time, enabling them to identify struggling students early in the academic year rather than wait for end-of-year assessments. You can also see the data of all schools in your district in one place, breaking data silos and experiencing a holistic view of the school district.
Our Analytics product allows users to drill down from high-level summaries to individual student data, providing a granular view of specific learning needs and facilitating targeted interventions. As a school administrator, you can also compare the performance of one school to another within the district.
One of our customers, the Houston County School District in Georgia, achieved a remarkable 43% reduction in its dropout rate in 2024, translating to approximately 200 more students graduating. Using Standard Education's Analytics product, the district created dashboards presenting real-time data on attendance, grades, and withdrawals to identify at-risk students effectively and created early intervention initiatives to keep them engaged in school based on that visualized data.
Standard Education's core offering, Analytics, delivers effortless daily data updates that can be visualized through various dashboards. Just upload your student data on a daily basis and let our dashboards do the analysis in real-time.
We have assisted districts in identifying and addressing issues such as inconsistent grading practices, chronic absenteeism, failing trends in math, and graduation rates.
- Activate real-time tracking of district demographics
- Track which students are falling behind so you can intervene early to get them back on track
- Our clickable dashboards let you drill into the most failed classes across content areas and grade levels.
- Instant insights into which teachers have the most students failing
- Teacher-focused dashboards for a bird's eye view of their classes
We want to help empower your school district to proactively identify and address trends with ease using our real-time dashboards so your school districts can stop living in silos, identify areas of improvement, and get to work. As you implement initiatives similar to Louisiana and Alabama's examples above, our dashboards can help track the progress, helping you identify what's working and needs to be iterated on.
Standard Education can lessen the workload and empower your educators to take the lead with the right insights. Book a demo today.