U-46 unveils interactive data dashboard online

Eliminating the deficit, doubling enrollment in Advanced Placement courses and cutting the achievement gap in half are goals few parents with children in Elgin-area schools would question.

But holding their public schools accountable to the goals can be another story.

Elgin Area School District U-46 on Monday unveiled an interactive dashboard that parents will soon be able to use to track how their children — and the district as a whole — are progressing toward meeting the district’s five-year goals.

“It gives employees a gauge of exactly where we are relative to Destination 2015,” U-46 spokesman Tony Sanders said, referring to the district’s five-year plan adopted late last year. “The purpose is to provide principals and teachers great access to data.”

The new program, designed by Follett Software Co. of Woodstock, allows principals to compare their buildings to others in the district; teachers to chart individual students’ growth; and high-level administrators to monitor the district’s overall progress.

District officials plan to create a version of the dashboard that parents and community members will be able to access on the district’s website.

“Our goal is to take the gauges … and put them on the website under ‘2015’ to show the public this is how the district is doing compared to those goals,” Sanders said.

Officials say the program is an improvement over the existing data warehouse, which has much of the same information but is not as user-friendly.

“It’s a visual display of that data,” Sanders said of the new program. “Right now, it’s very difficult for teachers to get into (the data warehouse).”

Besides sorting by student, class and building, educators in U-46 also will be able to search by ethnicity, gender, language and income level to see if any groups are being left behind.

The program is designed to protect student privacy, Sanders said. Teachers will be able to see only their students’ data, principals can track only their teachers, and parents would be able to access information only on their children, as well as broad, schoolwide or districtwide data.

The goal is to have teachers and parents using the dashboard by the end of the current school year, Sanders said.

U-46 has a $119,000 annual contract with Follett to build and maintain the data warehouse and dashboard.