Applying a business-minded approach to running our districts can feel like an affront to everything we value as school administrators. In education, we are focused on improving outcomes for students, not outputs of widgets and gadgets, and as such, we cannot expect a traditional business model to align with our needs and challenges.
We see things a little differently. For years, like many district administrators, we were trying to lead without a detailed map to guide us. We set action steps, but our strategic priorities, SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound) goals, and success metrics were often undefined.
By using data-informed decisionmaking, strategic planning, and resource management, we have strived to transform our school district into a high-performing organization that delivers exceptional education while making the most of every dollar.
Resources are often scarce in education, but what schools are not short on is student data. Over the past decade, we have seen an explosion of ed tech products—a recent study reporting that on average school districts access a shocking 1,417 different digital tools each month. When properly managed, the data these software programs are generating can be the key to meeting student needs.
Although the approach may look different in districts with different financial and staff limitations, this data-driven framework can be adapted and adjusted to fit any district’s specific needs. Here are three ways that operating from a business mindset empowered our district to cultivate a culture of continuous improvement and ultimately enhance the quality of education for all students.
1. Ensure fiscal responsibility.
District budgets are scrutinized closer than ever, and implementing data-driven decisionmaking strategies empowered our school staff to make the most of our budget and reduce waste.
Schools are often required to analyze massive amounts of data from a multitude of platforms—both overwhelming and time consuming. We invested in software that centralizes large amounts of student data into a single platform. This tool streamlined our administrative processes, reduced redundancies, and cut operational costs, saving valuable time for our educators and administrators.
Centralized data provide key insights that allow our staff to quickly identify specific areas where funds, resources, and personnel can have the most significant impact and return on investment, ensuring that financial and human resources are effectively allocated.
Furthermore, by automating many administrative tasks such as attendance tracking, behavior monitoring, and academic reporting, a data-management system reduces the time we spend on data entry and management. This frees up our staff to focus on teaching and other educational activities, instead of administrative overhead.
For years, our student data were collected in different silos, making extracting and analyzing information a time-consuming process for our 34 building administrators across the district. By centralizing data on one platform, we reduced the time each administrator spent on analysis by 10 hours per week, or 340 hours districtwide. In the first year of implementation, that time translated into $300,000 saved in administrative time. This school year, we expect to save more than $782,000, as we have become more functional with using the software. These resources can now be redeployed to more meaningful tasks, such as parent engagement and intervention-strategy improvements.
2. Manage the whole child.
Integrating and analyzing student data on academic performance, attendance, discipline, behavior, social-emotional development, physical health, and extracurricular involvement from various sources provided our educators with a comprehensive understanding of the unique needs of each child.
We then used these data insights strategically to create personalized support plans that addressed individual academic, social, and emotional needs. We also leveraged our centralized data dashboard to facilitate communication among teachers, students, parents, and administrators, ensuring that all stakeholders can collaborate effectively to support the student’s development.
For instance, the early-warning dashboard built into our data platform alerts our teachers and attendance team to students at risk of failing or dropping out of school. The insights collected allow us to better identify why a student is absent and deliver immediate interventions and tiered support, including daily phone calls home, attendance-officer home visits, individual student counseling, or court mediation.
We also expanded our district attendance staff from three officers to nine, including one lead attendance officer. Between this expansion and implementing the alert system, we reduced our chronic absenteeism rate from a high of 58 percent in 2021 to 38 percent in 2024.
Using data to provide a comprehensive picture of how key indicators may affect academics, readiness, and well-being has helped our educators understand where to shift their focus to offer the right support in real time.
3. Work toward shared goals.
Our district consists of 17 schools, each directed by educational leaders with a wide range of skill sets and perspectives. Without a centralized strategic foundation rooted in data, each would be rowing in different directions—wasting time and money and, ultimately, losing “customers.”
We learned early on that it was imperative to bring a dedicated resource team on board with both project- and data-analysis background to lead the interpretation and integration of our data insights. Our team was restructured to include a chief strategy officer, as well as a director of instructional leadership, who work directly with the principals. Both individuals have strong analytical skills and have helped train our principals to use the data in improving students’ success. Working together with our staff with traditional education training, this team has been key in providing data analysis upfront, presenting a clear analysis of the challenges, goals, and strategies we will use to succeed.
Additionally, by joining a national network, we have been able to collaborate with other educational leaders on best practices for identifying patterns and defining key performance indicators.
These data-driven goals are then tailored to individual schools and even into student-intervention and -support teams, tracked and monitored regularly to ensure everyone is working toward the same well-defined targets. Additionally, we created public-facing dashboards, which have offered us unprecedented buy-in from our school board and greater community.
It is crucial that schools invest in the necessary tools, training, and support to make data-based decisionmaking a central pillar of their educational philosophy. Ultimately, embracing data-driven strategies equips schools to better prepare students for future challenges, creating a more equitable and effective educational landscape.
