Duval County Public Schools’ Data Strategy Improves Student Outcomes and Graduation Rates

 

 

As of 2023, Duval County Public Schools (DCPS) in Jacksonville, Florida, ranks as northeastern Florida’s largest school district and the 20th largest in the U.S., serving over 130,000 students.

Situation/Challenge/Vision

In 2010, DCPS implemented an in-house database to aggregate raw data from various sources such as student records, HR, ERP, and more. However, they quickly understood that merely having a vast data lake wasn’t conducive for extracting meaningful Business Intelligence (BI). As a result, DCPS shifted towards a structured data warehouse, industry leading Business Intelligence (BI), and decision support solutions that were crucial in helping them achieve their vision. DCPS initiated a two-phase competitive bid to find an external vendor to establish the data warehouse and to demonstrate their capability. If successful, that vendor would then proceed to the second phase: Business Intelligence (BI) reporting.

Solution

Midtown Consulting Group (MCG) was ultimately selected and successfully developed a data warehouse private cloud architecture and set of operational processes that helped DCPS. MCG was invited to continue on to phase two, building the Business Intelligence (BI) infrastructure consisting of customized dashboards, reports, and predictive analytics.

Outcome

MCG’s service delivery has been ongoing for the past decade with a team of MCG consultants engaged full-time by DCPS to manage the district’s data operations.

  • Graduation rates have improved:
    • 27% since deploying the Grad Tracker dashboard and accompanying reports nearly ten years ago (63% in 2011 to 90% in 2020)
  • Record high sub-group graduation rates were seen:
    • African American students (84.5%)
    • Hispanic students (87.5%)
    • Low Socioeconomic students (81.7%)
    • Students with Disabilities (84.6%)
  • During the first five years of DCPS’ BI Journey College Readiness metrics have seen significant improvements:
    • 28% increase in college reading readiness
    • 58% increase in college math readiness
    • 123% in dual enrollment courses taken
    • 28% increase in African American dual enrollment pass rate

Duval County Public Schools participates in the Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA), a NAEP voluntary accountability program for 4th and 8th grade reading and math. The program enables comparisons among the nation’s largest participating cities, such as Atlanta, Los Angeles, New York City, and Jacksonville.

In the 2019 assessment, Duval ranked in the top five of the 27 participating districts in 17 out of 20 student groupings:

    • First among ESE students in 8th grade math
    • Tied for first (with Miami) in Grade 4 reading for Hispanic students
    • Grade 4 Math (3rd)

*Additional data available: https://www.teamduval.org/2022/10/24/national-assessment-shows-duval-county-public-schools-improves-rankings-among-peer-school-districts/