ESSA Dashboard

Each school year NYSED releases preliminary ESSA Accountability standings to the school districts of NYS privately via their IRSP portal. These standings are directly linked to seven reports found in the Level 2 Reporting platform. School districts did not have an efficient way to view all of this data in one, coherent space. If a school district was identified by one of the accountability designations, it was very difficult to follow the path that explained these designations.

I wanted a single dashboard for districts to review all relevant accountability data in one place. This meant SQL modeling work to ensure up to date data from the reporting platforms and creating automated ETL processes to load the non-structured data from the IRSP. From there, I designed a report page directly connected to each indicator of the accountability system. The goal was to have all student level data and indicator calculations available so a school district had everything they needed on a single screen.

All of the SQL work was done on a Microsoft SQL server instance with a dedicated database. Stored procedures were created to routinely migrate the necessary data from the L2RPT backend databases to our local database for more efficient report loading times. Additional views were created to provide things like county benchmarks and indicator gap analysis. Student performance benchmarks were created dynamically with DAX formulas to have percentile ranking comparisons against their specific subgroup, their school and their district as a whole.

In the few years since the public release of the ESSA Dashboard, district identifications have dropped to an all-time low. We are able to effectively teach the complex accountability system to districts with ease as the dashboard does most of the heavy lifting. Districts are able to focus on identifying students in need of support and can foster a mentality of continuous improvement.