Data & Analytics | News

National Academy Foundation Partners With ConnectEDU Data for Student Tracking

• By Mike Hohenbrink
• 10/02/12

The National Academy Foundation (NAF) and ConnectEDU have partnered to measure student achievement through the use of real-time data in an effort to monitor how ready students are for college and careers.

As per the terms of the deal, NAF students will utilize resources from ConnectEDU such as its real-time tracking data, career and college readiness resources, and data warehouse. The goal is to have more than 100,000 students graduate ready for the challenges ahead by the year 2020.

To make the real-time reporting happen, student data will be gathered from multiple sources including the NAF data warehouse as well as state and district sources with the goal of mapping the progress of both NAF academy students and non-academy students.

With the data collected, student achievement will be monitored in order to deliver targeted support and interventions as well as to study implementation of the NAF instructional model.

Specific components of the ConnectEDU platform to be utilized include:

• College and career planning tools;
• Comprehensive data warehouse capabilities;
• Student level data aggregation;
• Data analysis at the the individual student, academy, student cohort, school, district, state, and national levels; and
• Customized, real-time progress reporting.

In an initial step, NAF has already worked with ConnectEDU to analyze data on 15,531 NAF students in comparison to non-academy students drawn from Broward County Public Schools, Miami-Dade County Public Schools, New York City Schools, Pinellas County Schools, Porterville Unified School District, Rochester Public Schools, San Francisco Unified School District, and Waco Independent School District. To date, 23 school districts have been signed on by NAF, including more than 20 academies serving 30,000 NAF students.

"Through an integrated data collection and analysis system like this, we will be able to focus on improving the quality of our academies based on student outcomes," said Verna Martin, Oklahoma City Public Schools, "with NAF's support, we can ensure that we are providing students with the high quality education and college and career preparation they deserve."

NAF consists of 500 academies serving more than 60,000 students in 39 states, Washingtion, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Technology provider ConnectEDU serves "nearly 20 million registered learners" as well as 4,000 educational institutions and 130,000 employers.