Digging into the DESE Data
I’ve heard from parents directly and I’ve seen the posts on our town Facebook open forum that our schools “just aren’t what they used to be.” Being a researcher at heart, I wanted to dig into the data to develop a fuller picture of what this means. I’m still new to this but I’ve been looking at the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) data and particularly the Accountability results. Essentially, I wanted to chart all of the progress toward improvement targets by group (started with race/ethnicity and still want to look at low income, high needs etc).
What frustrated me was:
When I tried to pull up 2023 data, it glitched and kept taking me to 2024 data. I could only see the overall aggregate % and White students. I have no idea how other groups performed last year. (Edit 5/21/25 at 4:45pm ET: I figured out how to work around the glitch. There is no data on Hispanic/Latino; Multi-race, Non-Hisp/Latino, or Black students in 2023.)
Before 2018, the dataset seems incomplete.
There seems to be no data on Hispanic/Latino; Multi-race, Non-Hisp/Latino, or Black students in 2018 and 2019. DESE will only report on data if there is sufficient data from 20+ students, for example, so it could be that these populations were under the threshold. If that’s the case, how else are we tracking and measuring their progress? Our Hispanic/Latino and Black students are not meeting the targets compared to other groups. What’s the plan to address this?
Student group results by Race/Ethnicity from 2018 to 2024 toward overall improvement targets
Some of this data is captured in our District Report Card, but I’m also interested in trends over time and I wanted to chart that specifically.
Since this data is incomplete in places, I’ve been reviewing materials on our District website to see what other data we are using to measure progress. Per the LPS Student Opportunity Act Plan 2024, we also leverage VOCAL and the District Heatmap which I still want to cross-reference but haven’t just yet. The District has plans to purchase a “data warehouse application to monitor and track student well being” and “better analyze student behavior” but I hope we can also use this tech to track and measure performance toward learning goals and capture a holistic, well-rounded view of our students. With advancements in machine learning, we could possibly analyze trends and set alerts when we are falling below set thresholds in social-emotional learning and academic performance.
I think there is some compelling data here that we could use to make some informed choices as a community. This is an initial, cursory assessment and I want to pull in as much data as I can to understand how we have performed in the past 10 years (pre- and post-COVID).
I also want to see more complete data sets on our students so we can better measure progress toward goals. If other reporting sources have more complete data sets, fantastic. I want to deep dive into those. If not, that’s a gap we need to address soon.
Thanks to Kara D. for talking through the data with me and validating some of my assumptions!