Wrestling with reduced budgets, increased class sizes, and the new Alabama College and Career Standards for mathematics and English language arts, many Alabama school districts are seeking creative ways to boost their efficiency as they strive to improve student achievement.
To that end, Ozark City Schools, located in southeast Alabama, has selected Performance Matters to provide an integrated solution for data-driven decision making from the individual student level to the district level. Performance Matters is a web-based solution that provides an integrated platform for student assessment, data management and teacher effectiveness.
While Ozark City Schools is one of the first districts in Alabama to implement the Performance Matters system, the company’s product line is used in school districts across the nation, including nearly half of all districts in Florida and Maryland. The implementation in Ozark City Schools, which will begin this fall, was driven by the need for a comprehensive solution to support informed decision making district-wide.
“With our previous assessment and data management system, we couldn’t save all our student data from one year to the next. We needed a system that would allow us to collect and store longitudinal data from our state tests as well as our local assessments,” said Jacqueline Kelley, educational specialist for Ozark City Schools. “The reporting will give us the ability to review and analyze data in a variety of ways, from the district and school levels to the teacher and individual student levels. Plus, as Alabama moves toward incorporating student achievement results into teacher evaluations, this will give us an easy way to see the success our teachers are having with our students.”
Operating on a single, web-based platform, Performance Matters offers schools the capability to combine historical data such as state test scores with current data such as benchmark, district and classroom assessments. By combining past performance with current data, districts and schools can determine what’s working and what’s not to maximize their resources.
