Strategic Dashboard White Paper
This white paper discusses strategies that district leaders can use to reshape the narrative surrounding their schools.
Equity and Student Growth: Lessons Learned from the COVID-19 Pandemic
Download Research BriefAt ECRA Group, we celebrate educational leaders and school districts across the nation and their response to a once-in-a-hundred year pandemic. The overnight innovations while under immense pressure and the willingness of all educators to adapt is remarkable. Despite the seemingly insurmountable challenges, significant progress was made. Educational leaders have observed, first-hand, the…
New Research shows Negative Effects from Remote Learning
ECRA Group CEO, John Gatta, was interviewed by WGN America’s NewsNation regarding the impact of COVID-19 on student learning.
Leveraging predictive models to measure learning loss and growth recovery during COVID-19 school closures
Measuring learning loss requires that we recognize that student growth is personal in the sense that every individual student’s learning trajectory leading up to the pandemic was different.
Measuring and Recovering Learning Losses During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Documenting learning loss is important as the effects of school closures on learning loss are likely differential and asymmetric, resulting in large losses for some students, and negligible or negative losses for other students.
Case Study: CCSD146 Strategic Dashboard
CCSD 146’s leaders needed a way to clearly present their strategic plan both to the district’s staff and to parents and community stakeholders.
Tell Your Story by Defining Success
The ability to articulate and substantiate a compelling story of student success and school quality ultimately speaks to the return on investment that schools provide the communities they serve. School quality and student success are a matter of definition. For years, federal policy has controlled the definition of student success and school quality as predominately how students perform on state assessments. As educators, we know there are many additional outcomes that predict student success and align closer to the values of local communities. The story of local school districts is more comprehensive than what state report cards capture.
The state report card is only part of the story – unless the missing parts are never told. Absent the rest of the story, the incomplete story told via the state report cards becomes the full story. The idea is to provide communities the full story.
Leadership and Return on Investment
SCHOOL DISTRICT LEADERS face challenges when they attempt to document the relationship between costs and quality. Return on investment analysis is motivated by the strategic intentions of school boards and leadership to increase quality and optimize resource allocation. No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top and state accountability laws have shaped a definition of…
Evidence-Based Practice: The New Language of Leadership
Prior to the enactment of the federal No Child Left Behind ACT (NCLB) school boards and the broader school community defined the superintendency narrowly by the leader’s ability to manage fiscal, physical, and personnel resources. NCLB’s emphasis on academic achievement and school accountability began shaping a broader definition of school leadership that was far more…
Driving Student Performance with Systemic Analytics
Improving student performance is more dramatic when school leaders employ systemic analytics. Despite continued emphasis on systemic approaches to school improvement, schools struggle to use data and information in a manner consistent with systems thinking. Systemic thinking requires an holistic approach, one that focuses on the total school system by examining and understanding the interrelationships…
