Network Performance Dashboard
Network Performance Dashboard
Providing a comprehensive review of academic data for a network of schools.
This site is still under construction! Some content may be missing or incomplete.
Providing a comprehensive review of academic data for a network of schools.
Used by central office academic leadership, accountability team, and principals at 20+ schools.
Early in my tenure working in school administration, the superintendent came to my team to ask that we build out a more robust method of comparing data between schools in the network than what had existed previously. One of the benefits of being a network of schools is that best practices can be shared easily. As each school tweaks instruction tactics and ways to improve attendance and school culture, they can share findings and methods with other schools to have maximum impact on each student. To help drive those conversations, the network has historically produced a comprehensive overview of certain metrics at the end of each marking period. This tool was used regularly throughout the year by members of all schools in the network.
Originally schools would crunch together data in a number of Excel spreadsheets at the end of each term, and then email it around. Our team's job was to find a way to make it cleaner, more accurate, and more interactive. DP-SPAN (or, the Democracy Prep School Performance Analysis) was an online suite of interactive dashboards that we came up with for principals and teachers to use when digging through data from each marking period. Comparisons were made between each campus, allowing teachers from one school to have data-driven conversations with teachers at other schools on a variety of topics.
All of this data was collected through a variety of different pre-existing student information systems, aggregated into a data warehouse and a series of standalone extracts, and then visualized using Tableau. Tableau visualizations were then organized and embedded into a website to allow for more intuitive navigation. Graphics and layouts were standardized to create a clear sense of hierarchy, and the reports themselves were embedded directly into the organization's intranet- so valuable context could be added right alongside the reports themselves. DP-SPAN would go on to be the foundation for the style guide and design language that I created for the rest of the reporting that my team did at the organization for years to follow.