In just three months of real-time student grading trends, Houston County uncovered unhealthy grading practices across the school district.
As a long-standing customer of Standard Education, the Houston County School District was already using our SRSS product, meant to visualize student assessment data. They collaborated with us to develop the dashboards necessary for real-time grading trend analysis, early interventions, and informed decision-making.
“We were able to have real-time conversations about failure rates. It allows our admin and our support staff to work with teachers when they see hot spots pop up, or it allows us to be more proactive about it in the first place,” said Dr. Steven Hornyak, Director of District & School Effectiveness, Houston County School District. These dashboards, which incorporated Infinite Campus student data, were successfully implemented in October 2023.
“We have always had the data available to us, but Standard Education's dashboards help us identify areas that need improvement. It's not that we didn't want to track this; we simply didn't have a way to do it.”
This led to more than 300 students at one high school going from failing one or more courses to passing all of their courses, among other wins in the school district by the end of the Fall semester 2023.
Houston County School District, located about two hours south of Atlanta, collects information in Infinite Campus, an online tool for monitoring children's school progress. It's the home to over 30,000 students across 38 schools in Georgia.
The Infinite Campus Student Information System is great at tracking and storing student grades and displaying them for teachers, students, and parents to see. However, despite having access to all this data, Houston County was experiencing difficulties in seeing trends and reports and accurately understanding how many students were passing or failing at any given time.
An administrator would have to go in and pull a report, and it would generate a PDF document with more than 40 pages of student data. “Although we have the best intentions, as the year progresses, we lose focus on how every student is doing or how we as a collective group are doing,” said Hornyak.
They found that they needed to wait until the end of a semester or grading period to evaluate a student's progress accurately. However, they wish they had known this sooner, like during the middle of the semester or at the end of the first or second grading period, to intervene.
Standard Education takes student data and turns it into visualizations and analysis to help support students. This can lead to important insights on inconsistent grading, attendance issues, and other issues affecting graduation rates.
We have this saying in Houston County, "What gets measured gets fixed," and Standard Education has really helped us because it keeps, just at our fingertips really, a way for us to track daily how students are performing in those courses.
According to Houston County, failing 9th-grade English, Math, or both significantly increases a student's chance of dropping out or not graduating on time. The dashboard provides this information, tells them which classes failed the most, and highlights those specific students.
Post-pandemic, Houston County started Operation Graduation, an initiative to improve graduation rates in the school district. The initiative addressed three factors: withdrawals, attendance, and course performance.
“It's also important to us that students receive a consistent experience in the classroom. Regardless of which teacher they have for algebra or what grade they're in, we want all of our students to receive a quality education, and grading and fair practices around grading is a really important part of that," he says.
Here's how Houston County and Standard Education partnered to reduce failure rates in one high school by half in just three months.
Houston County implemented dashboard data insights into Operation Graduation, a post-pandemic initiative aimed at improving graduation rates.
The course performance dashboards were updated nightly and highlighted trends at the course level. The administrators accessed the individual student level via the student dashboards, highlighting what was happening across all content areas and grade levels.
Hornyak and the team brought this data to show needed changes in different schools across the district and go over actionable insights that help those at-risk students. “Data becomes compelling because it levels the playing field. It takes away the preconceived notions we have about students or what's happening in our classrooms, because many teachers don't even really know what their failure rates are. So just the act of observing the data is compelling to a lot of people.”
At Northside High School, one of their high schools, all the dashboards were rolled out. The principal used this data to meet with every teacher in the school, organizing planning period meetings to first disseminate the information contained in the dashboards.
Students face various challenges, including excused and unexcused absences. Houston County's goal isn't to achieve a perfect pass rate, but rather to ensure consistent grading practices and outcomes for all students. Our dashboards looked at withdrawals, attendance, and course performance.
The first red flag—35% of 9th grade students were failing their math class, an early warning of a student potentially dropping out or not graduating on time per the dashboards. This class saw a double-digit reduction after the data was shown to the staff.
After the initial meeting and armed with this data, teachers met with their PLTs (Professional Learning Teams) to improve their grading practices for the same subject. They made a conscious effort to move away from compliance grading, among other initiatives to motivate students.
"What happened though is that once we had a transparent way to see this data, it really allowed us to all hold each other accountable. We call this collective efficacy in our district. We saw a drastic reduction in failures for our students," says Hornyak. "The grades dashboard helped us uncover unhealthy grading practices that directly impacted graduation requirements and indirectly adversely impacted students’ academic confidence."
The most impactful changes at Northside High School between October and December 2023 included,
Hornyak and his team tried several solutions in the market, often off-the-shelf only options that did not allow for customization and not much human support or guidance.
“At Standard Education, things are quite the opposite. We have open communication and easy access to our account manager and the people actually doing the work. They act as a thinking partner, helping us develop new ideas and solutions,” he says.
“This is important for us and most districts, as each has different challenges requiring unique solutions. A one-size-fits-all product won't work for everyone.”
Standard Education’s platform helps process your district’s student data daily so you can get actionable insights to improve your schools’ performance—from attendance to graduation rate and assessments.
Standard Education’s core offering, Analytics, provides effortless data updates nightly that can be visualized in various dashboards, allowing you to stay informed of your students’ progress. We not only help you process your data, we lend a hand with how to put it into action within your district.
“At the district level, our approach to supporting schools has definitely changed. Previously, our meetings revolved around asking, ‘What did you do differently this month?’ However, we lacked a way to track the impact of these changes effectively. Now, with the use of dashboards, we can show schools their progress.”
More productive conversations came from the data as well as they’re able to track improvements over time. “The use of dashboards has changed the focus of our discussions and empowered the school stakeholders to take ownership of the data. Previously, the district would bring data to meetings, but now schools are bringing their dashboards and data, leading to more collaborative and productive meetings.”
Empower your school district to proactively identify chronic absenteeism and course progress trends with ease using our real-time dashboards and coaching from our education experts to implement initiatives. Standard Education can help lessen the workload and empower your educators to take the lead with the right insights.
Standard Education is a powerful data toolkit brought to you by Standard Co.