Charter schools often get a bad rap for overtesting their students, and my personal opinion is that there is some validity to that criticism. Testing is an inevitability, and I am of the firm belief that if that is the case, then educators as a whole are doing disservice to students if they are not learning everything possible from the data that is collected from those assessments.

That's a lot easier said than done though. For educators to do any kind of meaningful analysis, there is a considerable amount of pre-work that needs to go into the test itself, in addition to setting up a way to capture data, then turn that data into something meaningful on a short turnaround time after the test administration.

In my time at Democracy Prep, I and my team developed a robust system for capturing, processing, and analyzing data across the majority of the high stakes assessments administered to students in the network- empowering hundreds of staff to analyze data on consistent cycles throughout the academic year.

The assessment grading system that we produced was initially built for teachers, and was intended to address a relatively simple problem: With a growing network of schools using a shared curriculum, how do you ensure that shared tests are scored in the same manner? Using Google Sheets (and what would eventually become one of the foundational parts of the design language that DP uses) we designed a spreadsheet template that would do a few things:

1. Ease the process of combining scores from a bubble sheet scanner with hand-graded open response scores

2. Automatically compute and award a score to each student based on an answer key that was either entered by the teacher or automatically created by a curriculum specialist

3. Generate a variety of data visualizations instantly to push the teacher to do a careful analysis of the data

These files would go on to be a staple of each testing season at all schools within the network, with teachers reviewing them multiple times per year for different assessments for the last seven years.

While the system was first created for individual teachers, we soon started building functionality that would ease the process of testing for administrators, too. With each tested course being given a spreadsheet, there was a clear need for a better way to create those spreadsheets- so we created something called a Control Sheet that would allow administrators to control their test administration. These files included a number of functions (written in Google Apps Script) that would allow the user to generate sheets for individual teachers or courses, and that would import data back from the teacher sheets into the control sheet. From here, we could then design a number of visualizations that would summarize the progress of grading of the assessments, a summary of the results data, and more tools that would allow the leadership team and support staff to see results across the whole school as soon as possible after the assessment was graded.

Building on top of the school administrators view, we could then aggregate all data together for all schools in the network, building a number of tools that would allow central office staff to dig into assessment data across multiple schools. This empowered the superintendent team, the academic team, and the special education team to have incredibly in depth conversations with teachers and families about their performance on a variety of assessments. Often times these conversations could drill down to the question or standard level, as the details of each assessment were intuitively laid out and quick to find, located in a highly organized folder hierarchy in Google Drive.

The assessment grading system that I worked on over eight years involved collaboration from too many people for me to remember. Perhaps the most interesting parts of this work was always in learning about the assessments themselves. While we initially only created one or two sheet templates, we would ultimately go on to create more than 10 different sheet types with a range of uses. Some of them were based on highly complex literacy assessments. Some were specifically for administrations of certain state exams. Many of them evolved over time to accept data not only from paper exams, but from digitally administered exams as well. Over the years, I collaborated with teachers, principals, and central office staff from most of the teams in the administration. To date, this system holds incredibly detailed information on assessments completed by thousands of students over almost a decade.