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Hamilton County Dept. of Education

Situation

The Hamilton County Department of Education (HCDE) oversees nine K-12 school districts comprised of 78 schools in and around Chattanooga, Tennessee, including 36 Title I schools. With 40,000 students and 6,700 employees, the Department ranks alongside the Tennessee Valley Authority for its economic impact on the region.

Challenge

Evaluating school performance has become a critical task for K-12 districts, largely due to the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001. As a part of NCLB legislation, states supply districts with reports on how their students are performing, based on standardized state testing. The districts use this information to report their progress to the school board, parents, and community. However, HCDE administrators found that the state-supplied reports consisted primarily of summary data and were very limited in their range and depth of information. Students in Hamilton County districts were scoring below state target levels, but it was difficult to pinpoint why this was happening.

Solution

HCDE chose PASW Modeler data mining software from SPSS Inc. because it allowed the Department to take a deeper look at student performance by combining data sources and exploring variables beyond what state reports provided. This enables administrators to isolate characteristic warning signs of low performance and proactively intervene as needed.

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Results

PASW Modeler processes the data to build the most effective dataset, better data means better models, and better models mean better results.

PASW Statistics and PASW Modeler have allowed our educators to put a face on every number and the personalization of the data has resulted in the best NCLB results in our history!

— Dr. Kirk Kelly
Director of Testing and Accountability
Hamilton County Department of Education

Reduced high school dropout rates

Faced with an overall dropout rate of 16 percent in 2006, concerned administrators discovered through analysis that the strongest predictor of student attrition is age. Sixty-three percent of Hamilton County high school students who are two to three standard deviations older than other students in their grade drop out. Once administrators identified this problem, they were better able to monitor older students, as well as stress the importance of keeping younger students on track. As a result, the dropout rate decreased to 11.5 percent. To reduce dropout rates among older students even further, the District is working to open an adult high school in the downtown Chattanooga area in 2008.

Enabled performance tracking and prediction

HCDE evaluates student performance and keeps students on track earlier in their academic careers by analyzing students’ test scores in grades three through eight. Using PASW Modeler, the Department brings information from the district’s relational database, including student attendance and test scores, into predictive models that show teachers the predicted level of performance for individual students—below proficient, proficient, or advanced—so that teachers may focus more attention on students who are likely to perform at a “below proficient” level. This analysis is automated, with data compiled and models run overnight on a daily basis. Additionally, because PASW Modeler can integrate information from each district’s database and analyze the data in one dataset, it is now possible to track a child’s performance even as he or she moves from one district to another within Hamilton County.

Motivated teachers to excel

Predicting student performance for proactive intervention is not the only way the Department is using its models to create data-driven change in its districts. Administrators are also using eighth grade test history to predict students’ scores on high school exams and motivate teachers: for each student that exceeds his or her predicted score, the teacher receives a pay incentive. This approach has helped the districts raise student test scores as well as compete more effectively with the private sector for prospective teachers skilled in hard-to-staff areas like math and science.

Simplified reporting process

In addition to predicting student test scores and identifying at-risk students, SPSS Inc.’s data manipulation capabilities have made HCDE’s entire reporting process easier and more efficient. Today HCDE not only pulls data for NCLB reporting purposes, but also runs custom classroom reports, grade-level reports for grant applications, and school-level demographic and behavior reports.

This ease of reporting and analysis has enabled HCDE to uncover and share meaningful information about areas for improvement with faculty members and school leadership teams. According to Dr. Kirk Kelly, director of testing and accountability with the Department, it is easier for administrators to have these discussions with teachers and school leaders because the discussions are now rooted in data, rather than assumptions.