August 15, 2010

Schools need real data about their graduates

Aug. 15, 2010 at 02:12 PM | By Stephen Smith | Comment Count

Eight years ago when we started Naviance, most of the schools we were working with had never formally tracked their student’s college plans. Independent schools often built databases with decent reporting about their graduates, but those systems were often created primarily to report the effectiveness of college placement efforts and to keep in touch with potential donors rather than to evaluate the effectiveness of the academic program. At most public schools the situation was even more challenging with few schools maintaining any information on the college admissions decisions their students received and the matriculation decisions they made.

We’ve made a lot of progress since then. More than 4,200 schools now use Naviance to track detailed information about each of their students’ college plans, and they’re using those data to help students and families make better decisions and to improve middle and high school program offerings.

Now it’s time for an even bigger paradigm shift. With the increasing emphasis on college- and career-readiness as our measuring stick for education success, schools need to know not only whether their graduates apply to and enroll in college, they need to know whether they succeed once they get there. Schools need to know whether their alumni stay in the college they chose upon high school graduation, whether they transfer, and whether they need remediation. They need to know when and if they graduate. They need to be able to link these data to each student’s K-12 academic records to build success profiles that can steer future students toward greater post-secondary success and help administrators and faculty uncover opportunities for improving academic offerings in the school or district.

National Student Clearinghouse®, state longitudinal data systems projects, electronic transcript exchanges, and other efforts are an enormous help, but too often the valuable data available through these sources never make it to principals, teachers, and counselors who can use them to improve schools. As useful as it is for policy makers and researchers to have these data, that’s just not enough. And, even though raw data have great potential, it’s not until these data are presented in context and with intelligence that real change is possible. Until practitioners in district offices and schools around the country have meaningful data about what happens to students after they graduate from high school, we’re going to make very little progress improving the level of college- and career-readiness.