Big news for K-12 education technology! Munetrix, a leading performance analytics platform that consolidates siloed K-12 data into actionable insights, announced today the acquisition of Eidex, a pioneer in the K-12 data visualization space.
As we gear up for a new school year, transparency is one of the most crucial factors for success. Through the years we’ve learned that when schools maintain open communication and share data with their communities, it builds trust, fosters engagement, and creates a thriving learning environment.
That’s why we emphasize the critical components of transparency, like embracing financial clarity, promoting safety drill awareness, and implementing practical strategies for transparent decision-making. All while continually underscoring the importance of K-12 data, performance analytics, and educational financial transparency in promoting an outstanding academic year.
Here are our top tips for starting the school year off with transparency in mind!
Keeping Your Community in the Loop
Transparency starts with open and honest communication. That means establishing a culture of openness, where information, including valuable K-12 data and performance insights, is readily shared with students, parents, and staff. Some ways that our customers have found success is through regular meetings, town halls, and newsletters to make sure everyone is kept in the loop about school policies, decisions, and upcoming events.
But communications are a two-way street – encouraging feedback and promptly addressing concerns also fosters trust and makes the community feel heard and respected.
Fostering Strong Connections
It’s not enough to only talk to your community – engaging with parents and students beyond the classroom also matters. Through organizing community-building events, like parent-teacher meet-and-greets, workshops, and volunteering opportunities, you can create strong and lasting bonds with your community members. A bonus to this approach is that by involving parents and community members in the school environment, you can deepen the connection between the school and its stakeholders to foster a sense of ownership and make the school a community-driven learning hub.
Tracking Financial Data for a Solid Foundation
One of the essential aspects of running a school is sound financial management, including educational financial transparency. Mastering that is hard work and takes time. To achieve financial transparency, maintaining clear records of income, expenses, and budget allocation is crucial for schools. By tracking and analyzing that data effectively, you can make informed decisions, allocate resources efficiently, and address any financial challenges transparently.
Our most successful districts have found that using school management software and accounting systems ensures that their financial data is accurate, up-to-date, and readily accessible.
Engaging Stakeholders in Financial Discussions
School finances shouldn’t be a mystery – involving parents and staff in financial discussions through regular budget presentations and reports further promotes transparency. Without going into too much detail, explaining fund allocation, significant expenses, and the reasoning behind financial decisions will not only builds trust with your community, but by keeping it simple and explaining financials in a way that’s easy to digest you can invite valuable input and suggestions. This makes your community not only active partners in the school’s financial health, but also general advocates for your school’s expenditures.
Promoting Safety Awareness
Safety drills are crucial for preparing students and staff for emergencies, but they can also cause anxiety, especially for younger students. By transparently promoting safety drills, you can reduce fear and anxiety and increase community awareness. We also recommend proactively informing parents and students about the date and purpose of each drill while also providing clear instructions on what to expect and how it contributes to their safety.
Including the Community in Safety Preparedness
Safety is a shared responsibility, and involving parents and local authorities in safety drills and preparedness training demonstrates a commitment to a secure environment. Parents can also provide valuable feedback on safety measures, allowing schools to make improvements and adaptations based on their insights.
Clear Academic Expectations
Transparency extends to the classroom – by clearly communicating grading policies, class curriculum, and learning objectives to both students and parents, along with K-12 data and performance analytics, you can ensure that everyone knows what to expect. It’s been proven that when everyone understands what is expected, students are more likely to succeed, and parents can actively support their child’s educational journey.
Incorporating Open Decision-Making
Incorporating transparency into the decision-making process is equally important. Involving parents in important decisions that impact the school community, like curriculum changes, extracurricular activities, or school policies, demonstrates that decisions are made with transparency and inclusivity. Through surveys or advisory committees, you can also ensure a diverse range of perspectives, leading to more substantial support and understanding among the community.
Navigating back to school with transparency is about so much more than just sharing information; it’s about building trust, promoting engagement, and creating a sense of community. By communicating openly with the school community, including sharing K-12 data and performance insights, tracking financial data diligently, and promoting safety drill transparency, you can create an environment where everyone feels heard, valued, and informed.
What’s more, with Munetrix, you can turn school transparency from an aspiration into a daily practice. We take all the complex K-12 data and financial details you have and make them accessible to everyone, so you can share academic performance with parents and students in a way that’s both meaningful and engaging. By breaking down your budget using Munetrix, you can open up financial understanding to the entire community. And when it comes to collective decision-making, you can use Munetrix to convert abstract ideas into concrete plans that reflect your shared goals. It’s not just a suite of tools; it’s your partner in building trust, enhancing community engagement, and fostering a school environment where everyone feels part of the success story.
As educators, you know that each new school year is filled with excitement and anticipation… but it also brings a hint of mystery and uncertainty. Like gazing into a magical crystal ball, surrounded by foggy clouds of unanswered questions. But fear not!
This webinar is designed to help you gain the power to see the path forward by harnessing the magic of Munetrix. Discover the hidden secrets that will amplify your data insights and sweep away the uncertainty surrounding this new year.
Key topics covered:
As the new academic year approaches, we understand the mix of excitement and challenge it brings, especially when it comes to telling your community about what’s happening. But here’s a secret… it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. The key lies in one word: Transparency.
Our webinar is designed to offer a fresh take on school operations, emphasizing the crucial role transparency plays in building a robust, engaged, and successful school community.
Key topics covered:
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Two big topics we keep hearing from K-12 district leaders are that attendance and discipline are at the top of everyone’s mind.
During this insightful 45-minute webinar, our experts shared their knowledge on how the Munetrix Early Warning Module can empower leadership to proactively identify and address potential challenges, like attendance and discipline, within their districts.
Key topics covered:
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The K-12 public education sector is abuzz with speculation that we are approaching a “fiscal cliff” when it comes to federal funding of public school systems. Forbes Magazine reported months ago that “Federal COVID relief funds will be running out in 2024. A continuing baby bust will hit school enrollment numbers. There might be a recession coming (or not). All of these shifts will create pressure for school districts.”
If cuts are coming, and even wholesale elimination of certain line items, what does that mean for school districts already struggling to adequately fund instruction, recruit educators, and make the necessary investments to improve outcomes, reverse learning loss, and maximize gains in student achievement?
Of course, districts were not supposed to apply emergency federal COVID dollars toward permanent expenditures, such as hiring. But many did, and funding can be fungible regardless. The result many fear is that personnel layoffs are looming — at a time when educators and administrators are already feeling overworked and overwhelmed.
What we are urging our client partners to do is to maximize their use of available resources, data and technology to start planning for various scenarios today so that whatever lies ahead in terms of difficult decisions to be made, they can be approached with forethought, planning, preparation and the most amount of complete information possible.
Here are three things that superintendents, human resources professionals, educators and other district administrators can do today to plan for the uncertain future ahead:
1 – Try to identify opportunities to eliminate non-personnel expenditure redundancies.
Each passing year or so, without really thinking about it, professionals in every sector (the public and educational included) have incrementally added a tool here, an application there, a system here, a database there. We are now at the point at which enough has become more than enough — it’s become too much. Perhaps this is a time and opportunity to save costs by simplifying the administrative tech stack.
There are many reasons why you might want to simplify your tech stack, even if predicted cuts somehow fail to materialize. The most obvious among them is to save time and administrative burden of managing, maintaining and accessing this number of disparate technology tools. Certainly, once you find yourself looking to save money facing budget cuts, consider eliminating systems that overlap with one another — or consider finding one singular system that can achieve multiple tasks at the same time — as one way to save money before considering layoffs.
2 – Create peer groups to cross-analyze how other districts in your region are spending/cutting comparatively to your own.
The future of planning and budgeting is something called “comparative analytics.” Put simply, comparative analytics refers to the process of examining your own organization’s data and performance against those of your peers and competitors to draw more informed conclusions and to make better decisions. It’s a methodology for avoiding one of the greatest perils to critical decision-making: thinking we have all of the information we need and omitting a potentially decision-changing data set.
If you can view your own historical data and forward-looking projections against those of neighboring entities with whom you may be competing, won’t you be able to make more confident decisions and more strategic allocations of time, treasure and talent? Anything less, and you’re making critical decisions in a vacuum. If budget cuts become necessary, work today to plan for a future that affords you the confidence that you’re making cuts strategically and not putting your district at a competitive disadvantage relative to your neighbors and peers.
3 – Nobody knows the future with certainty. Build scenarios and plan for multiple potential tomorrows.
With so much uncertainty persisting in the public education sector, plans and predictions are ever-changing and more dynamic than ever. Creating a budget or forecast and presuming it will stand the test of time is no longer a luxury administrators and financial leadership have in this day and age. Cumbersome and laborious spreadsheets that remain static while the world evolves around them no longer suffice — especially knowing that drastic change may soon be coming.
Tools like the Forecast Builder and Budget Builder allow planning to be done with multiple possible scenarios envisioned, which can evolve dynamically and instantly. As new inputs or updated data become available using publicly available data sources and API, braided with a district’s own proprietary data, plans and budgets can be fluid and reflective of up-to-the-minute realities.
Whatever tomorrow holds, we recommend that school districts plan for it today. Even if the future is uncertain and undefined. The last three years have been a period of unprecedented volatility and incredible changes and external pressures put upon those in charge of educating the future of our country.
We managed to do our best to survive a global pandemic, we continue to manage the impact dramatic inflation and the toll it’s taken on our budgets, and now another challenge most certainly awaits.
But just as we did with the prior crisis facing public educators, we will do our best to provide as much support, guidance, resources and innovation as we can, so that every decision they make is data-driven.
United We Learn is the State of Kentucky’s initiative to propel forward the future of public education in the state, a vision built “around three big ideas: creating a more vibrant experience for every student, encouraging innovation in our schools – especially when it comes to assessment, and creating a bold new future for Kentucky’s schools through collaboration with our communities.”
To realize this vision, the Kentucky Multi-Tiered System of Supports (KyMTSS) is a multi-level prevention system to support student achievement and social-emotional behavioral competencies through an integration of differentiated core instruction, assessment and intervention.
The purpose of KyMTSS is stated to be to promote “the integration of systems-level approaches and state/district/school initiatives under one comprehensive framework to more efficiently use resources while focusing on improving outcomes for every student.”
That stated vision of equitable access and opportunity is, in fact, the paradigm: one comprehensive framework of six interdependent and interconnected components that are essential to the implementation and sustainability of an effective MTSS framework in Kentucky school districts.
The challenge is that the current reality of how data is gathered, stored and analyzed has historically been anything but comprehensive, one, interdependent nor interconnected, making the task of effective MTSS implementation arduous, onerous and time-consuming for those responsible for executing this vision. Many districts are, in fact, data-rich…but too many are also tragically knowledge-poor.
This is why the EdTech sector is pushing for greater interoperability and advocating for disparate systems and entities speaking a common data language. This is how we will collaborate to make this critically important initiative a reality, without taxing our resources or monopolizing educators’ time that is better spent on activities other than data mining.
The Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) has identified six elements as essential to the implementation, improvement and sustainability of an effective multi-tiered system of supports:
The first thing that jumps off the page to me are the words “collaborative,” “data-based” and “evidence-based.” We’ve seen firsthand how school districts nationwide struggle to collect and connect all of the various disparate systems and data warehouses that educators and administrators rely on to provide educational excellence and comply with transparency reporting obligations.
The KyMTSS Implementation Guide notes that the systems used for “academic, behavior and social-emotional supports often are implemented in silos or parallel systems that work independently of each other. Each system and initiative might have its own set of teams
doing the work, separate data systems and separate practices,” and recommends “building one coherent, strategically combined system to address multiple domains or content areas in education to achieve and sustain positive outcomes more effectively.”
It is important to note that, in doing so, districts should “braid” all available data sources, including those proprietary to the district itself, as well as all publicly available data sources.
What districts are increasingly finding is that events and data that occur outside of the classroom have a significant impact on outcomes that are achieved in the classrooms themselves, especially when it comes to social-emotional learning. Factors such as demographics, geographics, economics, equity of access, and many more contributing factors may have nearly as much influence on learning as curriculum, instruction and quality/training of teachers.
The answer? Seeing is believing. Truly seeing. Correlations that may exist between poverty rates, Internet access, geographical boundaries and student achievement can only be understood if displayed visually and overlaid on one another. A heat map will reveal where at-risk students tend to live, in most cases, and may also reveal some other important interdependencies. But this is not possible to examine if the data remains in silos. Nor is it achievable if it’s only displayed in a columnar table or a spreadsheet. All you see is numbers…when what you are looking for is trends, drivers, and potential causality.
Data must be visualized for better outcomes to be actualized.
A team of data scientists has partnered with educators and administrators to develop a comprehensive resource designed to support districts in implementing Kentucky’s state-required K-12 Multi-Tiered System of Supports. This guide can be used not only as a roadmap to effective KyMTSS implementation, but can unlock a singular system for implementing each of the six essential elements and providing the necessary documentation and reporting.
Examples from each of the six essential elements guidance protocols include:
Build and openly share a dashboard that “helps teams at the district, building, grade and content level to analyze academic, social emotional and behavior data in one, shared online platform.” (For example, see the Munetrix Early Warning Module.)
Configure a system so that it can “manage and analyze multiple types of data, including assessment, behavior, social emotional, attendance, demographic, perception, process, and other types of data in one centralized platform. This helps districts ensure that the data is collected, analyzed, and used to monitor both student outcomes and implementation of interventions over time.” This should include:
The Munetrix Early Warning Module is a tool designed with all of this in mind…all in one place!
Insist on technology that allows stakeholders to “analyze data and trends across various groups and sub-groups to help consider the range of learning needs and assets from accelerated to severe and persistently challenged. Dynamic filters are needed to help educators quickly and easily identify and group students by ability levels within areas of need, across multiple assessments.
Student growth and needs assessment must be supported by an “application that can analyze data to help identify the outcome and fidelity of implementation to monitor the effectiveness of instruction, intervention, and supports.”
The most effective solutions are ones that “equip district leadership with student and community demographic and socioeconomic data, so that they can ensure that MTSS leadership teams include key stakeholders such as students, family and community partners who are representative of the entire student body and holistic school community.” It should “blend financial and student data (academic/behavior/social emotional) in a single platform to empower district leaders to analyze the data in one place so that they can identify and address inequities of funding, student access to highly effective teachers, high-quality curriculum, school disciplinary practices, or other supportive resources such as technology.”
Ideally, the “system helps districts form active and reciprocal family, school and community relationships through transparency reporting tools and access to tools to evaluate community socioeconomic and demographic data as well as student, parent and community input or survey data collected through family engagement opportunities.”
If we were to simplify the guidance offered in this document, it would be this:
Take these simple steps and your district will be well on its way to helping Kentucky realize its vision of “each and every student empowered and equipped to pursue a successful future.”
Legislators have been working since 2012 to improve literacy outcomes in the state, notably when the state legislature passed the Third Grade Reading Guarantee, which required that third-graders pass a reading test in order to be promoted to fourth grade.
Committed to addressing this issue ongoing, educators and administrators in Ohio have implemented and are focusing on a number of strategies to improve third-grade literacy rates and numeracy.
By implementing these strategies, schools are working to ensure that all students have the skills they need to succeed in school and in life. But one area in particular that sticks out to me is this notion of “data-driven instruction.”
School reform from SB-1 and SB-96 have made financial forecasting and scenario planning for schools in New Mexico more important than ever. Regrettably, New Mexico recently ranked 51 out of 50 states and Washington D.C., but the state is “doubling down” to reverse course and improve achievement outcomes.
Meanwhile, lawmakers, the executive branch, the New Mexico Public Education Department (PED), and statewide educators and administrators are working to collaborate on a critical initiative referred to as “Moving the Needle.” This follows a much publicized lawsuit — the Martinez/Yazzie Consolidated Lawsuit — following which the PED acknowledged “the Court’s ruling that ‘no education system can be sufficient for the education of all children unless it is founded on the sound principle that every child can learn and succeed[.]’”
According to one recent news article:
Along with a proposed $4.3 billion support package from the state Public Education Department, lawmakers are mulling several pieces of legislation for the session, including revamping graduation requirements and increasing the amount of time students spend in school.
Those proposals, lawmakers and education officials have said, aim to improve student outcomes and close gaps for “at-risk” students, tackle statewide educator vacancies and better support schools and their leaders.
If New Mexico is going to be successful at “moving the needle,” it will be critical to measure all of the contributing factors that can impact student achievement — financial and educational alike.
Educators and school administrators nationwide are still reacting and responding to the release of the “Nation’s Report Card,” issued by the National Assessment of Educational Progress in late 2022. What came to few observers’ surprise was that achievement scores for both mathematics and reading declined significantly during and following the pandemic. Educators are now working hard to reverse those trends and get student outcomes back to pre-pandemic levels.
The good news is that there are concerted efforts like New Mexico’s Move the Needle initiative to counter the learning losses by teachers, administrators, superintendents, assessment professionals and curriculum directors alike. There truly is a “we’re all in this together” spirit that’s noticeable and admirable.
This unified front faces significant obstacles that have also emerged in this same timeframe: a national teacher shortage crisis and an overwhelming amount of work, compliance obligations, reporting duties, and even an avalanche of data to sift through.
Districts are now beginning to discover that less truly can be more — that simplifying and consolidating resources and technology can actually reveal clearer pathways to better educational outcomes, without adding more to our overworked partners in student performance.
Two of the most often cited metrics for educational progress are third-grade literacy rates and third-grade numeracy (mathematics) rates. Seen as key indicators of future graduation and dropout rates, these proficiency scores are key prognosticators of even distant outcomes, such as incarceration rates and a community’s economic health. When New Mexico officials speak of “moving the needle,” these are two of the most monitored statistics they will consider as success or failure.
Committed to addressing this issue ongoing, educators and administrators in New Mexico have implemented and are focusing on a number of strategies to improve third-grade literacy rates and numeracy, including:
By implementing these strategies, schools are working to ensure that all students have the skills they need to succeed in school and in life. But one area in particular that sticks out to me is this notion of “data-driven instruction.”
In short, data-driven instruction involves gathering together a database of information about the students in each classroom, and using that information to improve the quality of teaching in the classroom. The good news is that access to data has exploded in recent years; the bad news is that, while educators are now data-rich, many struggle with being knowledge-poor.
Too often, all of the data educators need to optimize education outcomes live in disparate silos, making it nearly impossible to access, analyze and leverage for the betterment of students. However, when combined, integrated and overlaid, what often results is that invisible becomes…visible.
We frequently use the term “braiding data,” which is an apt representation of the benefit of such an approach. Individual strings of rope in the physical realm are made much more stronger when braided together than are when used separately and alone. Your data is no different. When intertwined, integrated and interdependent, your various systems become much more than a stack — they become a powerful, complete and cohesive system that honors and accounts for all drivers and outcomes of a school’s or district’s ultimate success.
The stronger the rope, the better it will be to pull students forward and move the needle for an entire state.
School districts across the country have been challenged with decreasing enrollment numbers, in part impacted by the pandemic and alternative education options that parents explored during that time. While much of that student migration was predictably temporary, schools are still closely monitoring enrollment loss and gain in order to forecast and build scenarios for the future.
With per-pupil public funding tied so inextricably to enrollment numbers, district leadership are looking for any tools at their disposal to gain a better understanding of:
The challenge facing administrators and superintendents is manifold. One is increasing competition from a growing number of alternatives: private schools, student choice, home schooling, virtual academies, and so on. Another is understanding the myriad factors that are impacting such enrollment loss — some seemingly obvious and others lurking below the surface. And, third, once the drivers of enrollment loss are fully and completely understood, taking measures to counter student flight, and even perhaps reverse it.
Here are three tools that educators and administrators have at their disposal in the competition to retain and attract student families in and around their district.
The first step is getting a clear picture as to where student flow is going, both in and out of the district. Seeing a visualization that demonstrates enrollment trends in pictures can help administrators and educators literally and figuratively see the big picture and the all of the individual data points that tell the complete story.
A student migration visualization is an essential tool for understanding the ebbs and flows of students going in and out of your district to help manage and forecast enrollment. Our own Student Migration Map, for example, offers these tangible benefits:
Once you understand the trends, you can take a data-driven approach to examining and influencing the drivers of those trends.
Superintendents, educators, administrators, principals and counselors are increasingly focused on gaining greater insights into the individual student, in addition to studying building-level and district-wide trends.
How can such a granular tool help superintendents counteract certain kinds of enrollment loss? By heading their drivers off at the pass.
Parents and families have choices when it comes to where they live and where they send their children to school. Whether evaluating districts based on school choice or sizing up whole communities to make decisions about where to move, two of the most important data points parents will look at are graduation rates and dropout rates. They intuitively understand that the better a district scores in these metrics, the more valuable the community is as a destination to live, whether they have children to educate or not, in fact.
The all-new Munetrix Early Warning Module serves as an early detection system for children potentially at risk of falling behind their peers. If early indicators of potential at-risk students can be identified earlier, they can potentially be reversed and be neutralized as drivers of dropouts — and lead to higher graduation rates.
The robust, intuitive visualization software empowers educators, administrators and counseling professionals to view the whole child behind the myriad data points:
Rather than having to log into multiple, disconnected, disparate portals, the Early Warning Module provides a singular holistic view of each student, all in one place, enabling users to connect dots, spot trends, and detect risk early on — before it’s too late to reverse course.
There are often early indicators of future enrollment loss, as well as learning loss. Attendance, behavior, social-emotional learning challenges, home-life issues, etc., are just a few. Of course, each student is an individual — not merely an anonymous data point. Having the complete picture of any one individual pupil in the district is an emerging tool in the enrollment loss reversal toolkit.
Comparative Analytics is a method of data analysis that entails comparing a district’s own data set against those of its peers. If your school or district is truly in competition with its neighbors for students, treasure and talent, peer analysis is your competitive advantage in outperforming neighboring alternatives and reversing enrollment loss in your district.
Put simply, comparative analytics refers to the process of examining your own organization’s data and performance against those of your peers and competitors to draw more informed conclusions and to make better decisions. It’s a methodology for avoiding one of the greatest perils to critical decision-making: thinking we have all of the information we need and omitting a potentially decision-changing data set.
The good news: For schools and municipalities, the performance and budgeting data for all of your competitors and benchmarked peers is publicly available. All you have to do is go find it.
One of the most informative applications of comparative analytics is to closely examine learning loss or gains in student achievement against instructional dollars invested: gains per investment. In reviewing data in districts across the U.S., we have discovered numerous instances in which increases in instructional dollars spent do not directly correlate with student achievement gains. And vice versa: some districts that boast the highest academic performance are not necessarily those spending the most on curriculum or instruction.
If you can view your own historical data and forward-looking projections against those of neighboring entities with whom you may be competing, won’t you be able to make more confident decisions and more strategic allocations of budgets, personnel, investments and resources? Anything less, and you’re making critical decisions in a vacuum.
As in any endeavor, to be forewarned is to be forearmed. With so much access to information, it is incumbent upon all of us to see the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. May these tools help you and your district compete in the arena of enrollment, student achievement and community health.
Mike Geers is Client Partnership Manager with Munetrix, and he can be reached at mgeers@munetrix.com.
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