While the blog is on summer vacation, we’re sharing past posts about the many ways City Connects helps students thrive.
This week’s post examines the various ways data informs the work of City Connects. From supporting individual students to understanding the effects of poverty on learning, data helps inform decision-making.
A City View: Indianapolis Launches Dashboard Showcasing City Connects Data
City Connects’ personalized student support plans help teachers and schools to better support students, but what if this information could help an entire city? The City of Indianapolis launched ConnectIndy, a first-of-its-kind dashboard. The tool uses City Connects data from nearly 30 local schools, highlighting students’ top strengths, needs, interests, and barriers to accessing resources. With school-, community-, and city-wide insights, this dashboard opens the door to exciting possibilities for how people and resources across the city can work together to respond to student needs and interests.
Learn how Indianapolis is coming together for its students here.
Noman Khanani talks about data — and transforming education
Noman Khanani never expected to work in educational data analytics. But this former member of the Center’s research team reflects on his trajectory.
“I had always been interested in data,” he recalls. “When I was younger, I always enjoyed math and statistics, but I never really thought of pursuing this as a career. It was just something I was good at in the classroom.”
Working as a research assistant with the Mary E. Walsh Center for Thriving Children, he discovered the ways data can help create positive change.
“That was my first exposure to education research and the use of quantitative analytics and statistics to measure student learning and understand the impact of programs and interventions. This work combined my interests in statistics with working for social good.”
“People have been trying to reform education for a very long time,” Khanani says.
“A lot of what is left out of those conversations is how poverty is a huge contributing factor to the state of our educational system in terms of our outcomes relative to other nations.
“For me, research on City Connects confirms the idea that we need to provide students with the basic opportunities and support that everyone else gets if they grew up in households that are not economically disadvantaged.
Read more her
Using data to promote student success in Salem
Salem, Massachusetts was one of the first communities to implement City Connects across an entire city. As a city, Salem has rich cultural and community resources, but many of the city’s children still faced food and housing insecurity, and many children had other unmet needs. Teachers and school counselors had struggled to meet these needs because they didn’t have a structure to connect kids to community resources.
“The data makes our work come alive. It’s helping to guide our thinking on the framework and practice,” Ellen Wingard, Salem’s City Connects Program Manager, explains.
Read more about how data shaped the implementation here.
