10 Strategies for Creating a Culture

of Data-Driven Improvement
How Uplift Education, a Texas-based charter network,
uses data to set goals and catalyze school improvement.

At Panorama, we are proud to partner with innovative educators who are using
data to create school change and improve student outcomes. Rich Harrison,
Chief Academic Officer of Uplift Education, a public charter network in the
greater Dallas-Fort Worth area, shares how Uplift has leveraged a culture of
data-driven improvement to help teachers develop their teaching practice and
measure student growth.

About Uplift Education Here’s what Rich Harrison has to say about how educators and administrators can
promote a culture of data-driven inquiry and improvement in their schools:
• Serves 14,000 students

• 34 schools across 1. Pick your goals

Elementary, Middle and Before thinking about what you want to measure, you have to decide what you
High School levels want to accomplish in the next year, two years, five years, ten years. To make
• Based in the greater meaningful changes in your community, you need to have a vision of what
Dallas-Fort Worth area success looks like before starting to collect data. We spent years developing a
strategic plan with a clear set of goals. Those goals shape all of our work with
• Focused on preparing
our students, staff, and families. One of our priorities has been to help students
low-income students
for college improve their ACT scores so that they are able to get into four-year colleges,
because we have found that our students are more likely to persist in four-year
college programs.

Figure 1 - Uplift’s students have an overall

ACT score of 21.7. Tracking ACT scores is
not only a critical part of helping students
get into four-year colleges, but also
indicates college readiness. The figure to
the right shares the percentage of students
above “selective college readiness” (score
of a 23) by tenure at Uplift Schools, with
blue representing 3+ years at Uplift, and
yellow representing less than 3 years.

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 2. Choose metrics that matter.
The metrics that you choose should be related to your vision of what success
looks like in your school or district. As we thought about what great school
experiences would look like for our staff, families and students, we came up with
five goals and related metrics that would help us measure progress towards
those goals: student academic growth, teacher retention, successful adoption of
the IB and AP programs, student persistence over multiple years, and college
readiness. If we are hitting our targets in each of those five areas, we know we’re
heading in the right direction.

Figure 2 - Uplift has a dashboard that

tracks progress on the metrics that they
have chosen to focus on. Level 4
indicates whether the goal is being met
fully. The dashboard also looks at how
well individual schools are meeting
these goals.

3. Keep your data clean.

It’s very hard to do anything with your data, including sharing it with your faculty
and staff, unless your database is up-to-date. Investing in your data will allow you
to be more ambitious in the work that you do with it, and will give you better
insight into how your students and staff are doing now and in the future.

Figure 3 - 95% of Uplift scholars

are accepted to four-year college
programs. Because persistence in
four-year college programs is
considerably higher, Uplift has
made getting students into four-
year programs a priority.

4. Create a culture of sharing and mutual support.

Because discussing data in group settings can be challenging, we work hard to
make sure that our faculty and staff understand why sharing data is valuable. We
organize faculty into grade-level and content area sections and have them look
at their student data together. Because they’re all looking at similar data, it’s
easier for them to share strategies and focus on what matters: helping students
grow and develop. As we look at the data together, we emphasize the outcomes
that we want to see, and reinforce why it’s important to track progress towards
those goals.

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 5. Set aside time.
We believe it’s critical to look at data in small and large groups, so we’ve
established days every quarter for our faculty and staff to convene and discuss
data together. These days are important to remind faculty and staff of shared
goals and priorities and cement the kind of open, supportive culture we are
aiming to maintain. Faculty and staff know when those days will be and can
connect with colleagues without giving up time with their students.

Figure 4 - On a survey of 910 staff members, Uplift staff ranked Uplift highly as a good
place to work. Creating cultures of sharing and mutual support promotes camaraderie and
pride.

6. Establish growth targets.

Each student has a personal growth target for improving his/her test scores in
every core content area. We’ve found that establishing these goals for students
empowers them to be more equal partners in their own learning, because they
know what they need to be working on and can strategize with their teachers
about how to meet those goals. Teachers actively communicate and monitor
goals with students, but students are ultimately the owners of their personal
goals.

Figure 5 - Closely tracking students’

growth rates on MAP (Measures of
Academic Progress) and pass rates
on STAAR (Texas academic exams)
allows Uplift to determine whether
and how much students are
improving over time by national
quintile groups.

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7. Track progress.
We constantly track students’ progress towards meeting their growth targets.
Because the goals are clear and we know what success in meeting those goals
looks like, it’s easier for us to predict whether students will meet their targets. As
a network, we define our success partially through whether our students are
meeting their growth targets. If we’re not meeting those targets as a network, we
know we need to give our students and faculty more support.

Figure 6 - Uplift establishes growth targets centrally for students (usually to achieve 1.5
times their original score in each core content area) and works with teachers and students
to help them meet them.

8. Make data visible.

In order for data to be useful, people have to be able to see it. We’ve built
dashboards using Tableau ® (a business intelligence software that produces
interactive data visualization) accessible by teachers and principals on our
intranet that track student achievement towards their growth targets, so that
faculty have an up-to-date sense of how close to or far from meeting those
targets students are. Ideally, faculty and staff should be interacting with data on
a regular basis: it’s important to work with your faculty and staff to present the
data in a way that makes it easy for them to take next steps.

9. Promote buy-in.
We want our students and teachers to know that their voices and experiences
are a critical part of creating the school experiences we want them to have. We
work with Panorama to learn more about what’s happening with school culture
and how students feel about social-emotional indicators. Getting this kind of
stakeholder feedback—and matching it to our data about student achievement,
attendance, and behavior—gives us deeper insight into how to help our students
and faculty grow and develop.

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 10. Find resources to support continued learning.
While there are great resources within the education world, and I spend a
lot of time learning from other charter networks and education outlets, I’ve
been blown away by the amazing work with data that is happening outside
of education. I’ve been learning about how hospitals use data to track
patient progress, and as a big sports fan, I like thinking about what we can
learn from sports analytics that can be applied to education. Studying the
use of data in other industries can help us be more creative and apply new
practices to better improve student outcomes and prepare students for
college and beyond.

All of these fields are working on the same questions we are: what metrics
allow us to predict success? How can we do a better job of using data to
track improvement? Learning from other fields is an opportunity for me to
challenge myself, and hopefully I can better support my colleagues in
building the stronger academic experiences we want our students to have.

Figure 7 - Uplift works with

Panorama to collect feedback data
from students on social-emotional
learning topics like grit and sense of
belonging. Uplift’s leadership team
monitors the results of these
measures and analyzes the data
across other key indicators in the
network. Last year’s pilot will be
expanded to all Uplift scholars this
year— more than 14,000 students.

“
We used Panorama's SEL measures in five topics last year. In this pilot, we found
all five SEL topics had a positive relationship with student growth and
performance on MAP and ACT scores. This relationship was strongest with Grit.
This year, we will use the SEL measures with all of our students in grades 3-12 to
better understand how social-emotional learning can be used as a lever to
improve school culture, academic performance, and college readiness and
“
persistence.”
Rich Harrison - Chief Academic Officer, Uplift Education

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 About the Authors

Rich Harrison - After serving as the founding Middle School Director for the Denver School
of Science and Technology (DSST), Rich Harrison joined Uplift Education in 2011 to lead the
Teaching and Learning Team. Rich graduated from the University of Chicago and taught
middle and high school English in New York City and Denver for seven years. His first
leadership role was as a principal and English teacher for KIPP: Cole College Prep, which was
the first conversion charter school in US. In addition to working as the Chief Academic
Officer of Uplift Education, Rich is the managing director of three school sites in the
network.

Panorama Education - Panorama Education partners with schools, districts, charter

networks, and state departments of education to design and implement survey programs for
students, families, and teachers. Panorama offers a technology platform to support survey
administration and create reports that are clear, actionable, and, most importantly, help
teachers and administrators improve their schools. Panorama currently runs survey programs
in over 6,500 schools in 35 states, including those in the Connecticut State Department of
Education, San Francisco Unified School District, Dallas Independent School District and
Teach for America.

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