Transcribed Image Text: IBM Global Center for Smarter Analytics
Howard School, progress has been even
dramatic, with the graduation rate tripling over six
years, culminating in a
the last year. "We went from one in four graduating to
three in four graduating. You can't ask for better than
that in six years," says Howard principal Paul Smith.
"Though we're not sati sfied until we're at 100 percent,
we're happy with the progress."
more
nearly 10 percent increase in
Business objectives
Identify students who have a high risk of
dropping out of school
Identify special needs of subgroups of students
Identify a
performance of the students against to
evaluate the performance of the teacher
benchmark
to compare the
While educational intelligence has largely been
directed toward identifying and helping individual
students, Hamilton County is
predictive analytics into day-to-day teaching and
learning activities. Educators have always known that
the
also incorporating
Questions
1. Identify how predictive analytics was used to
solve the business problem. Explain how the
predictive analytics solution works.
2. Identify how analytics culture was built in the
behavior
roots of poor performance and drop-out
in high school often reach back far into a student's
early grades. Analytics
educators to better understand how these adverse
is enabling Hamilton
County
company.
3. Identify another possible predictive analytics
solutions can be applied in schools. Identify
the data that you need to be able to provide
this predictive solution. Explain how this
predictive analytics solution works.
s academic life cycle-
patterns form over the student's
and what they can do to correct them. It's seen in the
way Hamilton County teachers have formed networks
to more intensively interact with each other both
across grades (e.g., high school and middle school)
and within grades (e.g., a math teacher interacting with
a social studies or English teacher) in the interests of
individual students. A comprehensive and dynamic
view
of
the
student-crossing
educational
S.com
boundaries-is what makes this po ssible.
Hamilton County is also leveraging analytics to create
innovative teacher incentive programs. By looking at
the historical relationship between eighth-grade test
scores and high school exams, the county is able to
predict, in effect, a baseline performance benchmark
for each student. By compensating teachers based on
their ability to beat this rigorous benchmark, Hamilton
County is using predictive analytics to encourage
performance improvements for both teachers and
students.
also providing Hamilton County
pinpoint
opportunities to adjust the curriculum to meet the
specific subset of the student population.
For example, when analysis showed that male students
were scoring below females on the state's writing
assessment test, Hamilton County responded by
implementing a system-wide approach to address the
needs of male students and close the performance gap.
Analytics
is
administrators
with
the
means
to
needs of
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Transcribed Image Text: IBM Global Center for Smarter Analytics
Case Analysis 7: Hamilton County
dropout rates and lagging performance required the
county to address these problems on the individual
student level.
Department of Education
But that meant first finding the students who needed
help, and doing so before their problems led them to
drop out of the Hamilton County school system. At the
end of the day, there's no one better positioned to
sense when the student is in academic trouble than a
teacher or counselor with whom students have a direct
relationship. The trouble is, warning signs are often
complex and cumulative in nature, thus escaping the
notice of frontline educators and administrators. Add
to that the everyday challenges of running a classroom,
and it's all the more understandable how problem
students can fly “under the radar" until it's too late.
PARIMENT
ZONE
TEDUCATION
Kelly recognized that early detection of at-risk
students required a more multidimensional view of
their progress, performance and path through the
Hamilton County school system. To accomplish this,
Kelly developed a performance modeling tool that
extracts individual student data from the county's 78
schools and uses it to create predictive profiles, which
help to flag those students in need of proactive
intervention by teachers or counselors. Using built-in
algorithms, the model determines which factors are the
strongest predictors of
out. Based on the outcomes of the model, each student
is placed into one of four performance categories.
Identifying those students labeled "fragile" or "off-
track" is just the beginning of a process whose
ultimate aim is the success of the student.
Company Background
The Hamilton County Department of Education is a
diverse school system, providing roughly 42,000
students with a world class education. The system is
nationally renowned for urban school success as well
as middle school and high school reform. The district
offers a variety of educational programs for all
students including magnet schools, career academies
and gender-based classes as well as a focus on
individual student success and the
student failing or dropping
goal
students to compete in the Global Economy.
of preparing all
It started a few years ago, when Hamilton County
began looking into why its students were consistently
scoring below state benchmarks on standardized tests.
Administrators didn't get far before realizing they
lacked the kind of detailed, granular data that would be
necessary to understand the factors that contributed to
the poor performance, much less act on the problem.
What little performance data Hamilton County had
been receiving came from state scoring reports (as part
of No Child Left Behind), which provided a lumpy,
aggregated measure of whether the county's 40,000
students were on track.
Hilary Smith is a key part of that process. Based at the
Howard School of Academics and Technology in
Chattanooga, some 15 miles away from the home
office, Smith is the Department of Education's Lead
Counselor. Howard is an inner-city school, long seen
as epitomizing the kinds of problems- such as high
rates of dropping out and disciplinary problems-that
Hamilton County is trying to address. When Smith
first came to Howard seven years ago, it graduated just
one in four students, a far lower graduation rate than
the county as a whole.
The other key indicator Hamilton County tracked on
its own was the share of its students that graduated
from high school. Kelly and his colleagues realized all
too well that dropout rates and student performance
were affected by many of the same factors-in some
ways, two sides of the same coin. But most of all.
Kelly's experience-gained as a teacher and a
principal earlier in his 18 years in the Hamilton
County system-taught him that beneath the numbers
were children, and that solving tough problems like
For Hamilton County as a whole, that difference is
already apparent in a graduation rate that has increased
by more than 8 percentage points in the last year, to
nearly 80 percent.
standardized testing scores have also increased by
more than 10 percent for both math and reading. At the
Over the past few years,
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