News

Harvard’s Strategic Data Project to explore higher education network

July 31, 2019

With proven impact in K-12 policy and practice, SDP awarded planning grant to support college degree completion and more

Cambridge, MA (July 31, 2019)—The Strategic Data Project (SDP), an initiative of the Center for Education Policy Research (CEPR) at Harvard University, has been awarded a planning grant from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) at the U.S. Department of Education to explore the need for data capacity and analytic support across...

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SDP Fellow in the News: How Data Helped Head Start Centers Tackle a 'No Show' Problem

June 19, 2018

 

Education Week Article By 

June 19, 2018

What do you do when you build a preschool class—but many of the children never show up?

That's what happened at the Head Start program overseen by the Community Action Project of Tulsa in Oklahoma, or CAP Tulsa for short. In September 2016, 135 preschoolers—fully 20 percent of the program's Head Start population—never appeared at the start of the school year, even though their parents had enrolled them.

CAP Tulsa, as it has often done in the past, turned to data both to figure out the problem and devise a solution. And in doing so, it provided an example of how all of Head Start's 1,600 grantees are now expected to infuse data into their decisionmaking and continuous-improvement processes.

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Data Viz News

Making Big Data Useful Rather Than Scary for Teachers

November 1, 2017

Former Cohort 7 Fellow and current SDP Supervisor, Michael LaMont, helps Atlanta Public School teachers obtain and use data to better understand and leverage their students. He has helped introduce new teacher dashboards which offers information for teachers at the classroom level.

ATLANTA — School had already let out for the day, but the teachers at Hollis Innovation Academy in northwest Atlanta were gathered around tables in the library, laptops open, strategizing. Their screens showed how their current students had performed on last year’s...

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APS Story

Strategic Data Project launches OpenSDP, an online community for education analysts

May 19, 2017
On May 19, 2017, the Strategic Data Project launched OpenSDP, an online, shared community of analytic code, tools, and trainings to foster collaboration among education analysts and researchers.Housed on GitHub, users have access to code and tutorials for every stage of the analytic cycle, from preparing and standardizing user data to conducting analyses and producing visualizations. The platform is built on a data engine so code can be shared and run on synthetic data that mirrors agency data. SDP encourages users to share their own code, provide and receive feedback, and contribute new... Read more about Strategic Data Project launches OpenSDP, an online community for education analysts

Data Driven

December 9, 2015

Tom Tomberlin, an SDP Fellow Alum, discusses how he uses data to help school districts improve and why he decided to continue his work with SDP in the following article by the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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