The National School Boards Association (NSBA) today announced a partnership agreement with Performance Matters, a provider of comprehensive, web-based solutions for assessment, data management, and teacher effectiveness for the K-12 market. Through this alliance, NSBA’s member state school boards associations will be able to offer Performance Matters’ integrated product line to their district members at an exclusive discount.
The NSBA/Performance Matters alliance stems from NSBA’s work on Data First, a project of NSBA’s Center for Public Education that is based on the premise that education data, when used well, can help school board members, administrators, and other stakeholders make fact-based decisions. A subsequent grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation allowed the project to expand to training development and the identification of tools that specifically help school leaders use data effectively in their efforts to improve student outcomes.
“We feel quite strongly that having quality data, plus the ability to quickly and accurately analyze that data, is the key to answering the most important question in education: ‘Are our students learning,’” said Joseph S. Villani, deputy executive director at NSBA. “Performance Matters synthesizes data from multiple measures and provides a comprehensive view of all factors relevant to student academic achievement and teacher effectiveness. It is a perfect complement to Data First, and we are pleased to recommend it to our member states.”
Operating on a single, web-based platform, Performance Matters helps school systems improve student learning by providing an integrated solution for data-driven decision making from the individual student level to the district level. Using interactive dashboards and color-coded reports, educators can slice and dice data to monitor student performance and growth in real time, evaluate instructional impact, and analyze policies and programs. With timely, actionable data, districts can differentiate instruction and professional development, identify and share best practices, and invest their resources where they have been proven to have the greatest impact.
NSBA’s sponsorship program is available to states that Performance Matters currently serves. Five more states that are currently using the Data First training will be added this school year. Performance Matters and NSBA plan to expand the service offering to additional states after that. The cost of the Performance Matters system ranges from $1 to $9 per pupil, depending on the participating student population and services required.
