Beat the Clock: How a DIY, Low-Code Approach Brought the Maryland Educator Workforce Database to Life

“Building a data tool is a non-linear process. There are unexpected twists and turns and you can’t compartmentalize tasks in a sequential manner. Sometimes you have to go backwards to move forward.”  - Sabir Nazarov 

The diversity gap in the teacher workforce is well documented. Nationwide, just 21 percent of all teachers are people of color compared to 52 percent of K–12 students. This stubborn disparity—present in every U.S. state—raises critical questions about teacher pipelines, licensing rules, and compensation. And given the strong base of research showing strong positive impacts from having a same-race teacher, it poses an urgent challenge.  

In Maryland, where 29 percent of teachers are people of color compared to 66 percent of students, a range of education stakeholders are getting a closer look at the data as part of a broad-based initiative to improve public education in the state. The new Maryland Educator Workforce Dashboard, a project facilitated by SDP Fellow Sabir Nazarov, consolidates data from local school districts to provide a clear snapshot of the educator workforce at the state, district, and school levels.  

“While there are clear design principles for making dashboards simple to navigate, that doesn’t mean they are easy to build,” said Nazarov, a strategist in the Office of Research at the Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE). 

“At face value, a dashboard sounds like you are just getting some data, visualizing it, and publishing what you make,” he said. “The project management principles tell you to make a plan, involve stakeholders, and execute. But that’s not how this works. You are always building bridges with people, across different organizations and sometimes in your own building. In complex environments, the usual project management precepts may not necessarily apply.” 

“Data work is people work” 

Efforts to build an educator dashboard began in 2022, soon after legislators passed the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future. The education-improvement plan called for comprehensive action in five domains, including teacher quality and diversity, with a 10-year horizon. Nazarov and an internal working group at MSDE began the project by assessing current data and gaps, researching educator data dashboards in other states, and identifying potential stakeholders for a new system. 

Then came the Maryland Educator Shortage Reduction Act of 2023, which took aim at crisis-level teacher shortages and captured headlines by offering $20,000 stipends to some prospective educators. It also set a hard deadline of January 1, 2025, for a new educator dashboard to go live. While the mandate only included broad strokes of what the dashboard should include, a useful tool would need to feature demographics, experience levels, retention, and other information about teachers currently working and those aspiring to work in Maryland schools.  

The project quickly had to move past the theoretical: “We had spent a lot of time internally talking about what our goals and vision might be, and we really stayed for a long time at that high level,” said Nazarov. “Those are good conversations to have, but ultimately, you have to got to start building something.” 

The mandate posed two major logistical challenges. First, while data about current teachers was readily available, data about prospective educators was not. 

Nazarov embraced a flexible, interactive approach that focused on how the new data collection could mutually benefit the different offices and organizations involved. He met with a variety of preparation programs, including traditional public and private universities, HBCUs, and alternative preparation programs. These engagements ultimately led to the development of a new streamlined data collection that better aligns with federal reporting requirements, lightens the administrative burden, and most importantly, will enable a more targeted understanding of prospective educators’ career trajectories in the state.  

An Entrepreneurial Approach 

The law posed a second challenge: it imposed a deadline without sufficient time or funding to hire a vendor that could build the dashboard under typical government procurement rules. Outsourcing the project through a Request for Proposals process would take at least 12 months.  

So Nazarov took a DIY approach and used plug-and-play data tools to assemble the first version of the dashboard in-house. He taught himself two Microsoft data-visualization applications, Power Query and Power BI, which he had first encountered during an SDP workshop early on as a fellow, and then built a working prototype of the dashboard. The prototype spurred robust conversations about what dashboard features and metrics were most desirable, which informed decisions about design and business requirements. The team hired developers to build out the public version of the dashboard in time to meet the legislature’s deadline. 

It wasn’t the typical government agency way of doing things, but it worked. 

“Organizations shy away from dashboards because they seem very technical,” he said. “But we used what was available, what was the easiest way to get started. . . I believe a project should be guided by the actual value it delivers and not the tools it uses.” 

Lessons Learned 

The Educator Workforce Dashboard project has been successful to date because it enhances organizational capacity to use and apply data in a meaningful way. Partner organizations see their work reflected in the data and are enthusiastic participants, Nazarov said. 

He attributed that success to ongoing conversations with a variety of stakeholders, to ensure that the newly revamped data collections would reduce administrative burdens while also providing valuable new insights to end-users.  

“Whether it’s legislators or board members, principals or teachers, we want people to walk away with relevant, deeply contextualized insights into Maryland’s educator workforce,” he said. 

This work continues. To successfully meet growing demand for relevant and timely data, the systems that produce and publish that data must continually improve, he noted. The next phase of the project, already underway, is focused on elevating direct engagement with users. 

“The value is that this tool translates data into actionable insights,” Nazarov said. “We tend to treat data as a good in itself, but I think it’s the value it creates and the informed decision-making that comes from having appropriate and contextualized information that is its true value.” 

Similarly, Nazarov stressed the importance of not focusing on the technical details, but keeping trained on the big picture—both for project managers and data specialists.  

“Dashboards have been relegated to the technical domain–knowledge of how to create them is treated as an esoteric tool. But that does not need to be the case,” he said. “This technology doesn’t require the ability to write complex code. It requires a fundamental understanding of what the data is and what it needs to be.”  

For more about SDP’s work on educator workforce pipelines: 

• Access our open source toolkit, housed at OpenSDP on github:
• Read our latest press release about new work on an educator workforce diagnostic: