K-12 Data for Better Educational Outcomes: Achievement, Behavior, and Attendance
Listen to the Common Good Data Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.
What if the key to improving educational outcomes was already in front of us, hidden in the data schools collect every day?
Attendance records, test scores, and family surveys offer insight into equity gaps, systemic barriers, and opportunities for intervention—but too often, this data isn’t used effectively.
In this episode, we’ll discuss how nonprofit professionals can collaborate with schools to analyze and apply data in ways that close gaps in access and achievement.
You’ll learn how to identify disparities, interpret data within the community context, and use it to inform programs that directly support students and families.
This episode highlights ways nonprofits can use data to advocate for resources, measure impact, and drive equitable education initiatives.
You’ll hear:
(02:30) How achievement data like standardized test scores and graduation rates can help organizations identify trends and support curriculum improvements.
(08:57) The importance of using behavior data such as suspensions and discipline referrals to understand and address classroom disruptions and bullying patterns.
(15:19) How attendance data—like chronic absenteeism rates and daily attendance records—can be used to develop targeted intervention plans and support student engagement.
(20:11) Where to find publicly available school data and how organizations can use it to demonstrate their impact effectively.
Resources Mentioned
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Drew Reynolds: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Common Good Data podcast. My name is Drew Reynolds. Friends, it's the end of the semester, which means it's nearing finals for many students at the, uh, K through 12, as well as university levels. I know my own students at the Georgia State School of Social Work are working hard on their finals as well.
So I thought it was an appropriate time to talk about school data and specifically student data in schools from the lens of and other social sector organizations who work with and collaborate with schools and school districts to improve outcomes for children and youth. Now, this episode comes as our final one that's going to be focusing on needs assessment and looking at secondary sources of data for the purposes of needs assessment.
So for those of you organizations out there who are trying to work with children, who work with youth in some capacity and want to understand, you know, what is, uh, do dropout rates look like across our district or our set of schools near us or what are school, [00:01:00] uh, student achievement data looking like or attendance data.
This episode is really designed for you so you can be able to find out, you know, how to access that data and then also how to make sense of it in meaningful ways when you're conducting needs assessments, uh, or doing other types of work with data. You can even use these school data for things like evaluation and tracking purposes as well.
Now, common school data indicators, at least the ones that I'm going to be focusing on today, include student achievement, student behavior data, as well as student attendance data. Now, there's lots of other types of data that you can use for this, teacher retention rates, financial data in schools, but we're going to focus on these three because they're the most commonly used.
by organizations like nonprofits and others to be able to conduct needs assessments for students in, um, in their communities. So we're going to be focusing on those three. I'm going to walk through each three of them and kind of what they are, how they're measured, things to be thinking about, how to use them in needs assessments, and then, uh, ultimately, uh, provide some ideas about where you can access this information and these data as well.
But first, before we [00:02:00] get started, if you're looking to expand your organization, One of the best ways to do this is to evaluate and demonstrate your impact. So organizations who consistently evaluate their services and show funders and stakeholders that they're making a difference are the organizations that grow.
So if you're looking to find new ways to demonstrate and communicate your impact, head on over to commongooddata. com slash impact. We can set up a time to chat and help you develop a personalized impact strategy to help you advance your mission and serve more people. Alright, so let's dive in. Let's talk first about Achievement Data.
So Achievement Data refers to things like standardized test scores, things like student grades, graduation rates, or conversely dropout rates, as well as growth metrics, looking at kind of how are we seeing each of those How do we use achievement data typically for needs assessments or other evaluation work?
What you want to be doing is looking at, I think, two things I like to look at. First is looking at trends over time. So [00:03:00] usually, uh, you're going to be able to look not just at this year's, but prior year data to see how does the data today compare to where students were last year. a couple of years ago.
It's always an opportunity too to look at trends within subgroups, and this is particularly true of education data where you look at subgroups by often race and ethnicity is a big one, but there are other key categories that show up, subgroups, the categories that show up in education data. Things like students who qualify for, uh, McKinney Vento Services.
So students who are experiencing homelessness or housing instability. That's a group. Students who are English language learners you'll see is another group that shows up as a subgroup in education data. Sometimes also students with a disability you'll see and there are a number of others that you can you can look at but those are some of the big ones.
So you identify trends and you look at disparities between these groups to help identify where particular needs might be within a given school community. And then, you know, that's kind of the big [00:04:00] macro level. It's kind of looking at these big trends at the school level. Now on an individual level, a lot of school practitioners will actually use an individual student's data to develop, you know, uh, improvements and interventions for that child, or sometimes maybe a group of students within a classroom as well.
So data are used for all kinds of reasons. But for your purposes, you'll typically probably be looking at the school wide or, or district wide data to be able to, uh, make, uh, Some type of, you know, assertion about what's going on in a community when you're doing a needs assessment. Now, data that focuses on achievement, a lot of times it tends to, when I'm looking at a student achievement, particularly of standardized test scores, they tend to be expressed as percentiles.
So from zero to a hundred. So if you're in the 50th percentile, then you would be, um, the same number of students scored higher than you in the test. Than those that scored below you, so you're kind of right in the middle. And then as closer you get to a hundred, you know, UB is higher on that percentile range.
Uh, now the thing is, is that where does that percentile actually come from? Typically that [00:05:00] percentile is, is, you know, sometimes you'll hear the term normed, uh, but they're effectively looking at what is the average by some type of jurisdiction, either the state or national level typically. So you can kind of compare yourself to state or national averages using those percentiles.
A lot of times you'll also see those percentiles divided into groups. Um, I know here in Georgia we have, we've got four groups, um, and in different states might look at it differently, but you'll typically see something along the lines of the quartile ranges. So the top quartile range, the second quartile range, third and fourth.
I'm going from basically 75 and above. Sometimes it's five and you're looking at instead of four groups. Uh, but those will then be given labels, things like this group is proficient, this is group is exceeding, uh, or exceptional or something like that, or they might say needs improvement or below grade level.
So you'll see some of those indicators as well. I like working with percentiles. I think they're a little bit easier to understand for people, but some people like working with the group categories too. So it depends [00:06:00] on kind of how you want to communicate that information. Now, a kind of key thing to think about when you're looking at achievement data data in particular is to distinguish between the total or absolute value of scores versus growth.
So you might say, hey, this particular school community, uh, the, the average percentile of students in third grade math is at 30%, which would be low, you know, when compared to national or state standards, you might say, oh, things are going terribly. That's, that's, that's difficult. Well, maybe, but. If it was 25 percent or 20 percent a year or two ago, that would be quite a lot of growth, actually, for achievement data.
It would be a really promising sign that, you know, the types of interventions that the school is taking on or changes that are going on at the community level are leading to positive, um, outcomes. you know, growth in, in student achievement at the school level. So it's always important to keep in mind that whenever you're looking at achievement data, it's always about comparing it to what, to where you were, you know, uh, to national [00:07:00] averages, or sometimes it's best to just compare against your own group or your own school, your own school district, uh, in prior years so you can look at that growth over time.
Um, another thing to keep, uh, in mind too, and this is particularly relevant now is that it's really. Difficult to compare data on school achievement now to where it was maybe five or 10 years ago because of the impact of COVID 19, you know, nationally we saw between a five and 10 percentile drop in math and language achievement scores.
And so you say, well, Hey, things are way down now where they were. compared to before the pandemic, we haven't caught up. Um, so that maybe isn't the best comparison. You might want to be looking at, you know, what was now versus last year versus during the pandemic to see if you're seeing growth over time.
So always paying attention to some of those big macro level indicators that can sometimes have an impact on school, uh, data, student data, that can be a really important thing to be looking at. Um, now there are some limitations with achievement data. The [00:08:00] first being that standardized tests. They have their limitations.
Uh, there's been studies that look at, you know, potential, uh, examples of, of bias, of racial bias or other forms of bias that are baked in to standardized tests. So you have to be mindful of those that can sometimes can account for some of the differences you're seeing or disparities you're seeing in scores.
Um, but I think even more Even more broadly speaking, what I would say is that, uh, student achievement data just simply doesn't capture everything there is to know about learning. And so when you can use those as a indicator, but I always remind people not to use them as the D or the only indicator or the defining indicator to recognize their limitations and that learning goes on, uh, um, You know, learning cannot be captured just simply by one standardized test scores.
So a lot of times people will also look at things like qualitative measures or other types of things that are going on in the school environment to be able to try and tell a more complete picture of what might be going on in that school or that school district. Okay, so that's achievement data. Next, we have behavior data.
[00:09:00] And so, what is behavior data? What does that term refer to? And typically, what that means in the school setting for K 12 schools is you're looking at discipline referrals, in and out of school suspensions. Those are kind of the big ones, or expulsions, right? Those are kind of the behavior indicators that are tracked over time.
Now, how do we use that information? Well, at a macro level, when you're trying to do a needs assessment or talk about a community or a group of schools, uh, or an individual school, you're looking at patterns of behavior over time. And you're kind of looking at, you know, some things you might look at, for example, could be, uh, what are some of the, uh, patterns of behavior that we're seeing over and over again, that the types of discipline referrals that are showing up.
You know, I know a lot of folks who do substance use prevention work might focus on the number of discipline referrals related to, you know, possession of a substance at school, whether it's alcohol, vapes, or something else like that. That can be helpful. to understand, you know, what are the causes that give rise to behavioral problems or suspensions and how maybe a particular thing might [00:10:00] be at the at the root of that cause.
And then it's also a lot of interest in discipline data focuses on excessive discipline. So, you know, to the extent to which schools might be over suspending students and keeping them effectively out of the classroom that might be providing a barrier to learning and other forms of student engagement.
Now, behavior data tends to be expressed as counts. So you might see data on the number of suspensions in a given academic year at a school, for example. Sometimes those counts will then be turned into ratios, and when you turn them into ratios, that allows you to account for the difference in student population.
So if you have a lot of suspensions at one school and not many at another, well the reason that could be is because the other school is much larger than the other one. But if you turn it into a ratio, for example, the number of suspensions per 1, 000 students, you can then use that number as an indicator to be able to compare evenly across schools of a different size.
Um, again, as with achievement data, it's always important to look at [00:11:00] trends. So comparing your behavior data, you know, Your suspension data across the state and national benchmarks can be really important. Um, again, along with achievement data, it's important to look at data from prior years and see changes over time.
Uh, COVID is not a good one to look at because during the COVID years, suspension rates were really low because all the students were at home. Uh, but then it spiked up real high when students came back into the classroom for the first time again. So be mindful of the data points that you're pulling, um, and how COVID may have had an impact on what those trends look like.
Now. The other thing about behavior to be paying attention to, and this is the same with achievement, there's a lot of stuff that can explain behavior. It can be changes in school policies. It can be changes in school administration and leadership. I already mentioned COVID 19, of course. Um, you know, other, sometimes there's large scale events at a school, like a, a bunch of students engaging on one activity that leads to a lot of suspensions, for example.
Um, some things like that can, um, Are things to be paying attention to when you're looking at suspensions data, especially [00:12:00] when you're working at individual schools where you might only have maybe a dozen suspensions in a given year, you know, a difference between 12 and 15 nine suspensions might be explained by one or two events, uh, and might not be indicative of a larger trend or problem, um, at the school when it comes to suspensions.
Now, another indicator, Um, that to look at is the number of suspensions versus the number of people suspended, uh, because sometimes that can show, uh, really different types of situations that are going on, right? You know, if you have 20 suspensions in a school, but 19 of them were one person, that would be high.
Of course, it's an exaggeration, but that's a very different story than saying that 20 different students were suspended, right? You know, you're looking at, uh, a much broader indication, you know, a number of students who would be involved in school discipline rather than just one student who might have a particular unique challenges or needs on their own.
So there's some things to be thinking about with, uh, behavioral data. Um, note that as well with a, you [00:13:00] know, the achievement data, there are concerns around implicit bias in both data collection as well as disproportionate suspensions for particular group. And this is particularly true of Black and Latino students, students of color.
who may be more susceptible to being suspended. Uh, also, it's another thing to be mindful of in this is to be careful in the way that this behavior data can be used in a way that's punitive to students or in a way that actually further disadvantages them along the line. You know, as, as students begin to be more and more involved in school disciplinary decisions, it almost comes like a cycle sometimes.
So you have to kind of be paying attention to that and where those trends might be showing up in the data. Uh, you know, for schools, and I think as you're thinking about needs assessment work, you know, I think the key, the key focus comes in, in terms of decision making and approaches that you're taking as an, as your organization and working collaboration with schools is to be thinking about culturally responsive [00:14:00] behavioral management techniques.
So how, how can we find ways to address potential, for example, disparities in discipline, um, uh, among different subgroups? by, you know, engaging more culturally responsive ways or understanding that behavior manifests itself differently according to culture. That's a big thing that comes up with behavioral data.
And then also as school administrators, they're always trying to balance this need to maintain a safe and orderly environment while also not being too punitive to hamper student success. That can be a real challenge. A term that comes up a lot that you might see when you're looking at behavior data is a term known as the school to prison pipeline.
And what that refers to is the way in which students, and oftentimes students of colors we're referring to here, but not in all cases, you'll find that students who get involved in the discipline system in schools very quickly find themselves in the criminal justice system. And that school environments that, uh, are overly punitive or that disproportionately [00:15:00] um, Suspend Students of Color might also be exacerbating those same problems that we later see in adulthood, in particular in the criminal justice system.
So we have to kind of be examining and be familiar with that term and be examining strategies that can be used to mitigate the potential for schools to be functioning in this particular way. Okay, third one, let's talk about Attendance data. So what is attendance data? That tends to be chronic absenteeism as an example of them, daily attendance, tardiness records, anything about school and students being in seats, right?
Um, you can even, I guess, add enrollment data to that would be kind of interesting to, to look at. But, uh, so, so what, why do we use attendance data? Well, really, we, what we know is that the more students are in school, the more successful they tend to be. And there's a correlation between the amount of days you're in school and your success in school.
So it's important to to have students in the classroom as much as often as possible so that they can receive the instruction that they need to be successful students. I actually like [00:16:00] attendance as a great indicator for after school programs, parent engagement programs, and other those that are trying to impact students.
And I think because attendance is actually one of the indicators that you can move the quickest. Student achievement is a hard one. It's really hard to move the needle on student achievement, and so many things can explain it. Same thing for behavior in some degrees as well. But, you know, what a lot of after school and parent engagement programs and other type of student support programs can do is have, you know, a mentor or somebody who is connected to a child who may have been chronically absent in years past, but checking in with them and making sure that they're getting to school.
And you can sometimes see a much bigger impact. quicker impact on that, um, on the absentee, absent indicator than you can on others. So I think it's a useful one. Uh, now the term, uh, what, what does chronically absent mean? That's a good question. Oftentimes, you know, you're looking at students being absent from school.
Being absent in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. You know, they're sick one day or [00:17:00] they need to go to a doctor or whatever could come up, right? Um, where it becomes a problem is when students reach the level of being chronically absent, which is Because our back of the thumb, often defined as about 10 percent of the school days are missed.
Now, school districts will use different cutoff points for this. Sometimes it's 13, 20, you know, there's, there's different, um, indicators. So you'll have to check with what your, your state or local jurisdiction uses to define that term. But I think having a good knowledge of maybe the percentage of students who are chronically absent can be a Good indicator as to whether or not that, you know, it's, it's important, you know, you're, you're, you're experiencing a challenge or a problem there.
So that's a good indicator to look at. So the number of chronically absent students, or maybe the percentage or the ratio that you could then, to be able to compare across multiple schools, you could look at that for Number of days absent for student. Now when you're looking at, at school absence data, one of the key things, some of the key themes that come up when you're looking at that [00:18:00] data are, what are the potential causes for why a student might not be in school?
And So many of them, but one of the reasons that comes up a lot is actually around transportation. This is particularly true for charter schools. I know that when I was serving on the board of a charter school, uh, we knew that we had a lot of students who were coming from long distances. Other parts of the county with, you know, battling Atlanta traffic trying to get to school on time.
And so, uh, we developed a, a transportation plan to be able to help some of those students who are most vulnerable. We've got a lot of people who live furthest away from the school to be able to have access to a bus to be able to get to school on time. So things like transportation can be an intervention to address tardiness or chronic absenteeism.
In addition to that, we've got school safety. So walking to school, is it a safe environment to be able to walk to school in the morning? I know this is also true of not just walking to school and what's going on outside, but also what's going on inside school. This is particularly true, for example, for LGBTQ, non binary students.
so much. You may be experiencing [00:19:00] higher proportions of, of, uh, bullying or other types of, uh, unsafe, uh, environments in, in, inside the school. And I know that there's lots of research studies that show that some of those students don't feel safe and then as a result, don't come to school. So addressing school safety can be really important in the perceptions of school safety.
Uh, poor instruction. That's actually a really big one too. If the students don't feel like what they're learning from their teacher in the school room, they're That's a big driver of students deciding to check out. Um, this is particularly true, I think, at the high school level, when you start to see, you know, student dropout rates and things like that increase.
And also, the challenge that comes up with, uh, Amson data is, what do you do about it? You know, do you punish students who are not showing up at school? What do you do? Give them a suspension? Well, it just, you know, Puts them out of school even longer, right? And makes the problem worse. So strategies for addressing absenteeism are very different.
Now, many of you who work with youth, um, on this topic know exactly, you know, what I'm talking about and what those kinds of interventions look like. But we have to be mindful, I think, as we approach, [00:20:00] uh, students not being in school and, and find ways to ensure that we can try to provide the best environments that, and allow them to be in the school environment and to be there learning.
Now, we talked about achievement data. We talked about. Behavior data, and we've talked about attendance data. But a question you might be asking is, is where can you access these data? Well, typically each state will have some type of dashboard where you can download and access anonymized school level data.
And when I say anonymized, what that means is you won't have access to individual student records. We have FERPA, the federal law that protects student data, so nobody can just go and access that, right? Um, so you, but you can access. Anonymize school level data for the purposes of reporting and public transparency.
So you can find out, for example, in a school in your community, how they score on particular scores for, you know, school achievement, attendance, and behavior, and others. And there are different websites that can sometimes put together [00:21:00] dashboards for you. I personally like to go to the source. So I go all the way to the state, and typically each state, the ones that I'm most familiar with are Georgia, North Carolina, but both, um, the Department of Public Instruction, North Carolina, and the Governor's Office of Student Achievement here in Georgia, both websites have really great and robust, um, um, places where you can go and access, uh, Excel data sheets that have all these, these data outlined by school and by district.
So, uh, Now, but now there might be situations where you may want to access individual student level grades. Um, and typically that involves a process of working with the school district. Sometimes they'll have an office of accountability or data or something like that. And you can reach out to them to fill out that form.
Oftentimes an application process. Sometimes it may require an institutional review board if you're doing formal research. Sometimes there's community partner programs where they can share information about students with, you know, the student's parents consent so that you as a non profit entity might be able to have that [00:22:00] information when you're, to guide your programming in after school work or another sort of student support work that you may be doing.
Now, the one thing that I really love And I'll conclude with this thought about school data is that it is so consistently reported. It doesn't always come out right away. You might have to wait a year to get the year before his data. There's always a bit of a time lag between when the data are collected and when it's actually reported online.
But the great news about school data is that it's federally mandated that it's reported. Um, and so each, Each state has some kind of way of providing that transparency to its constituents. And so when you want to find some really solid indicators that people understand well, and that you can, uh, then use to kind of track a little bit of identifying what needs you might have in a community, or in the case of, you know, evaluation, looking at what big changes, maybe positive signs you've seen.
School data can be really, really, really helpful for that, because it's just so consistently reported, so well understood, um, and, [00:23:00] and so easily digestible, I think, by, by your audience. Now the challenge that comes with school level data is that it's almost impossible for most non profits who are doing smaller scale work.
I'm not talking about the big ones, or the big research studies, or the big, big interventions. But when you're doing smaller And when you're working in a small or mid sized organization, you're not really going to be able to make any definitive or what we would call causal statements in the evaluation and research world about the impact of your after school program or your school based intervention on Student Achievement.
Because there's so many things that could impact it. It's not just you who's impacting the child. It's the child, it's their family, it's their school environment, it's their home environment, uh, it's the the political macroeconomic system that they're in. Um, all of those things have an impact on student achievement.
I think I've read some studies that it's maybe somewhere around a third of students of student achievement data can be attributable to what actually happens in the school building. [00:24:00] Some of the research kind of varies on that a little bit, but on what that number is. But the point that I'm trying to make here is that even schools have limits on what they can do.
to impact student achievement attendance and behavior data. So it's important to be, um, modest with the claims that we make about changes that we may be seeing, um, or trends that we may be seeing with respect to student school level data. Um, and instead just to use those trends to simply talk about what's happening and to have a better understanding of what's going on so you can tailor your interventions and programs accordingly.
So anyways, I hope that this was a useful introduction to school data for those of you who are new to it. It was fun for me to do this one. I'm a former high school teacher myself, so I mean having an opportunity to talk about school data is always a fun one in the context of this podcast. So thanks so much.
I hope you have a wonderful week. And for those of you who we, um, who have been listening all through this series, I hope you find that this The series of data that we've had [00:25:00] on, on needs assessment and other forms of secondary data have been useful to you to find out more about some of those other episodes or other resources.
You can check us out at www. commongooddata. com slash podcast. I'll see you next time.
