Friday, November 22, 2019

Google Data Studio Report Catalog

I've been developing (and blogging about) Google Data Studio reports for Massachusetts schools for about a year now, and I realized it was becoming difficult to locate specific reports since they were embedded in blog posts. So I've created a searchable "report of reports" catalog with links, so now the individual reports are much easier to find!

 Please visit http://bit.ly/tiltondata and check it out! Please feel free to provide any feedback, or ideas for new reports and visualizations. You can find me on Twitter sharing additional resources @tiltondata.




Friday, November 8, 2019

School Attending Children Report - updated with 2019 data!

The School Attending Children report is submitted to MA DESE each February by each town's school department. Each town self-reports the enrollment of all full-time students whose parents or legal guardians are residents of the city or town (not just students for whom the district is financially responsible.) Categories include private and parochial schools, collaboratives, out-of-district public schools, home schooled, charter schools, and local public school districts (including regional and voc-tech districts).

DESE makes this data available online but it is challenging to look at the information longitudinally to understand how populations have changed over time. Google Data Studio can help! Click the image below to explore the data for any Massachusetts town.


Friday, November 1, 2019

School Accountability Percentile Breakdown Report

If you've been digging in to the state accountability data for your district and school, you know that it's very complex and that there are a lot of numbers to look at! Each school receives an overall percentile (as well as subgroup percentiles) which measures the performance of students in a school (overall or in a subgroup) compared to other schools (or subgroups) in the state in one of three categories: high schools, non-high schools, and middle-high or K12 schools. These percentiles, from 1 to 99, are calculated using the percentiles of each of the individual accountability indicators for a school or subgroup through a complex weighting process. The percentiles piece of the accountability system is called the normative component of the system.

There is lots of accountability data available in School and District Profiles, but the percentiles available there are just overall percentile and subgroup percentiles. The individual percentiles of the accountability indicators (like ELA performance, graduation rate, chronic absenteeism, etc.) for a given school or subgroup are harder to find. But wouldn't it be nice to know WHICH of these indicator percentiles is particularly low or particularly high for your school?

I've created a new report in Google Data Studio which will allow you to easily explore this data (which DESE makes available as several very large public spreadsheets) for a given school and group. When using this report, please make sure you choose one district, one school, and one group. If you do not select all three, the data displayed may not be correct.