KALAMAZOO, Michigan – Return on Investment (ROI) is one of the leading financial measuring tools for businesses and industries everywhere, including school districts. But another ROI is even more important to schools, Return on Instruction.
Level Data, Inc., North America’s leading school and student data validation software provider serving more than 7 million in student population, announces it has purchased Glimpse K12, a school curriculum measurement tool that shows district leaders which education programs are being utilized, and their effects on student progress, so data-based decision making can occur by school leadership in both forms of ROI.
“We optimize school spending around what works for students,” said Nicole Pezent of Glimpse K12. “The Glimpse platform strategically aligns everything the district is doing to raise student achievement, captures how they are implementing it, and measures these activities versus student outcomes. Administrators receive return-on-investment and return-on-instruction reports to guide future decisions.
“Strategic alignment and ROI analysis ensure districts are measuring activities in the context of student outcomes which is critical to optimizing resources around what’s working for students,” she added. “School district’s two basic responsibilities are to grow students academically and be fiscally responsible to their community. We help give them the data to be able to monitor those things.”
Public School Administrators and Student Data Specialists everywhere understand that recording and maintaining accurate student data is critical to school operations and funding from government sources. This new acquisition offers school districts the maximum of both worlds – clean and accurate data to maximize school district funding, and a tool to measure the effectiveness of educational programming that money is spent on.
Level Data – which creates an easy system for enabling incredibly-accurate Student Information Systems (SIS) intuitive for the tasked school employees – is always looking for new and innovative ways to get the right information into the right hands of the right people at the right time in school districts everywhere.
“Glimpse K12 is a valuable return on investment and return on instruction tool that we can help populate from all the right authoritative applications in the district so that district leaders can get a really good sense of where they should be spending their money, and getting effective use of the money they are spending,” said Matt Betts, president of Level Data, the 15-year-old company whose software maintains data validation for more than 1,500 school districts and multiple State Departments of Education across the U.S.
“It’s about what kind of tools can we give school district leaders so that they can make decisions with facts, rather than feel, and supply them accurate information on what’s being used, who is using it and who is using it well.”
In the past 15-20 years, school instruction has grown significantly from the days of students using textbooks and one or two computers in the classroom; now to major innovations in online learning tools available to teachers and students – some free and some with very expensive licensing agreements. The COVID 19 pandemic quickly accelerated such online learning techniques.
This huge trend in learning options has completely changed the landscape for school administrators. A lot of the options are extremely innovative and can be great assets for student learning. But there is also a lot of guessing and experimentation relying on anecdotal review.
“From classroom to classroom and from school to school, the administrators have a hard time understanding (in measurable data terms) what one teacher is doing vs. what another teacher is doing vs. what the overall district is hoping to have happen,” said Adam Pearson of Glimpse K12.
“Until now, there was never really a dashboard view to strategically align what we are doing for these students, and more importantly evaluating how effective it was – because if it’s very effective it’s a great insight into using it for best practices and help develop other educators. Likewise, if a certain program is not effective then there is good data showing a need for change from a data-driven perspective, not just anecdotal or arbitrary decisions based on personal feelings.” More information can be found at: www.leveldata.com/return-on-investment
