Georgia school district improves graduation rate and student success with Power BI and Azure

Choosing Power BI

Under the leadership of Tim Fleming, Director of Technology Services at Forsyth County Schools, Forsyth’s Technology Services team sought to find a way to help assist and advocate for their students by using the most current information and consolidating data in a modern way. Forsyth evaluated many products, but found they were either too expensive and lacked customization, didn’t provide clean dashboard-style reports, or weren’t accessible to the average user. With the help of 3Cloud, a Microsoft partner, the Technology Services team eventually chose Microsoft Power BI as their analytical tool for its affordability and seamless solution to effectively bring data together in one place.

Introducing and transitioning into Power BI

Forsyth incorporated Power BI into its system in the following three phases: 

1. Consolidating data and building the foundational architecture and reports
2. Introducing standardized survey responses about students and their learning environments
3. Utilizing historical information and success metrics to predict trends and behaviors (currently in process)

Phase 1 began by combining data from disparate sources to create a unified data model for reporting. The first steps required combining all the data from the various sources and compiling the information. Using Microsoft Azure SQL Database, the team built a staging area to bring in and incorporate all the necessary data. They then began to build tables within that database to support analytic data models. The team has also utilized Azure Data Factory as an orchestration tool to manage staging synchronization.

Figure 1 in the Downloads section of the left-hand sidebar depicts the current Forsyth solution architecture.

Early on, the team decided to use Azure Analysis Services for their semantic models. However, the Technology Services team wanted to implement additional features, such as automated machine learning. In order to do this, the team has started to move from Analysis Services to Power BI Premium. These models are supported by a data lake built on Azure Data Lake Storage.

Using these Power BI datasets as semantic models, users can immediately start working in Power BI rather than having to spend time structuring the data before getting started. Citizen developers can easily access data through the semantic models in Power BI Premium, knowing that their information is accurate and comes from a single source of truth.

After establishing the underlying architecture, the team created numerous accessible, easy-to-use, dashboard-style reports that highlight student metrics at the district, school, classroom, and individual level. The use of the XMLA endpoint in the migration from Analysis Services to Power BI Premium made the migration of any pre-existing reports possible with minimal work.

Building dashboard-style reports to help students succeed

Focusing on student progress with Power BI

With the baseline architecture established, Forsyth began to build out several dashboard-style reports to pinpoint problem areas that students were facing.

One of the primary reports created is a student-centric report that offers standard information on a specific student, or cluster of students, including some performance information. The report provides information such as assessment information, current class scores, gender, ethnicity, and graduation prediction level. The bottom of the dashboard includes visualizations that help indicate whether a student needs extra accommodations or help.

Student performance, including grades and test scores, can also be viewed via a dashboard-style report. This report offers a big picture view of how a group of students are doing in certain classes or on specific assessments, with the ability to drill down to the analysis of an individual student. Information such as GPA, course schedules, absences, discipline referrals, and most importantly, whether the student(s) is at risk of not graduating can be found in this report.

A report was also created to track specific class grades. The report is typically used at a district level for management to analyze the achievement differences between schools and fix disparities to create as uniform of an education across the district as possible. However, a user can also use the report to drill down from a district-level view to understand the grades of a specific student.

Creating a report regarding the graduation standing of individual students was very important to Forsyth County School District’s goal of increasing their graduation rate. Mainly used by counselors, the lower of the two dashboards below highlight how many credits a student needs, how many credits that student has completed, and the student’s progress towards remaining credits. The visual comparison allows for counselors to determine where a student needs academic help and create a specific plan to get them on track for graduation.

Utilizing reports for the whole district

Two other reports were created to provide the district with an overview of how students are progressing. For all school districts, testing is a big factor in understanding student progress. One report gives a holistic overview of students in the school district relative to their testing results while also comparing their progress to other students in the state of Georgia. The holistic testing report features the CCRPI (College and Career Ready Performance Index) score, a state metric used to decide if students are ready for college or a career.

The other report highlights student performance over a period. The report highlights trends over courses, GPA, attendance, test scores, and more. When a student has a downward trend, administration can step in and help the student get the immediate assistance they need.

Tracking disciplinary actions with Power BI

Forsyth County School District developed a plan to also utilize Power BI to track and recognize disciplinary actions. As a result, the Technology Services team developed two dashboard-style reports that offer broad and specific insights into incidents—including when they are happening and which students are involved.

The first report highlights the types of incidents occurring and how they are being handled. This report helps ensure there is equality among incident resolutions and works to treat students fairly across the board.

A secondary incident report monitors the frequency of incidents occurring and the type of incidents that are most frequently occurring. This allows for staff to see what incidents are happening the most and how action can be taken to lower that frequency.

Both reports allow Forsyth County Schools to detect the students that are frequently acting out and identify ways to help them both inside and outside of the classroom.

Showing users the art of the possible

When designing the dashboard-style reports, Forsyth did so with one thing in mind: its users. In the early design stages, the Forsyth team had a general idea of what they wanted and created numerous conceptual design mock-ups. But to make dashboards as effective as possible, Fleming went directly to the users to learn exactly what they wanted from this new technology.

Fleming quickly learned that without previous knowledge of Power BI, it was difficult for users to know what they wanted from the tool. Fleming shifted gears and started by asking users to create a list of general needs. He took the feedback and created baseline mockups that he then showed to the educators. Once Fleming demonstrated the art of the possible with Power BI, the feedback and report suggestions started coming in.

By pursuing a user-centric design approach, Forsyth was able to create dashboards that fit everything that the educators and Forsyth County Schools needed to help their students succeed.

After the reports were designed based on user input, Phase 2 of Forsyth’s Power BI journey began. In previous years, the Forsyth County School District sent out surveys to parents, students, and faculty about their experiences in the school district. Survey results would be compared with previous years to understand district growth and satisfaction levels. Survey results would be collected and analyzed by hand, a process that would take two to three weeks. Often the high volume of data returned made utilizing the information extremely difficult.

With the new data pipeline and Power BI, Tim’s team set up a process where survey data could be analyzed in 25 minutes after being collected. With such a quick turnaround, Forsyth has incorporated that data into its dashboards and uses it to help students in even more specific ways.

Building on a strong Power BI foundation

Since Forsyth built a strong foundation with its semantic model, creating the dashboards and building on top of them has been nearly seamless as it enters its Phase 3 plans. With Phase 3, Forsyth is beginning to utilize machine learning, specifically with automated machine learning in Power BI, to look at past data, make determinations about students, run current students through a model, and then make a prediction about the students’ graduation outcomes.

The Technology Services team found very high usability with the results from automated machine learning. Each student has a prediction score, representing the probability of successful graduation. The model also creates a base probability score that is compared to prediction scores to analyze how likely a student is to graduate. All the scores also include an explanation breaking down the different weights and elements affecting a student’s prediction score. This allows users to understand the rationale behind the model’s prediction scores.

In the future, the Technology Services team hopes to teach and encourage less technical individuals on how to build and integrate their own models into their specific reports in the hopes of giving users a more personalized and autonomous experience.

Driving user adoption

A challenge that the Technology Services team has had to overcome was figuring out how to get users to adopt this new technology and see its full value and potential. One big challenge was making sure reports were accessible to all skill and knowledge levels. While technological aptitudes across the district vary, the ease and cleanliness of Power BI reports make business intelligence available to all levels. Tim Fleming states that “Power BI has been an outstanding product for us. It really makes the hard-to-look-at data very easy to digest. [Power BI] makes it so that anyone can look at a chart, decide which students are in need, and provide necessary resources.” The highly comprehensible nature of Power BI made adoption much easier and less intimidating to users.

The educators and administrators at Forsyth are busy with their everyday workloads, so the Technology Services team has focused on highlighting how Power BI can make certain aspects of their work easier. As a result, the team has started hosting 30-minute training and work sessions to train users in Power BI. By working with small groups of principals, assistant principals, and counselors, the Technology Services team has been able to showcase how Power BI can quickly deliver important and actionable insights.

Next steps for Forsyth County Schools

Forsyth County Schools estimates that the implementation of Power BI has saved the district over $300,000 in staff resources and time. More importantly, using Power BI, the staff at Forsyth County Schools can quickly and effectively pinpoint struggling students and get them the help they need to graduate. The district is aiming to move the 94 percent graduation rate to 100 percent. According to Fleming, "We’re finding the students who maybe have fallen through the cracks over the years. We’re presently working with the students to make sure they’re going to graduate, and I guarantee you’re going to see our graduation rate go up because of those students that we’re able to find and get help—and Power BI enabled us to do that.”

A current challenge being tackled head-on is handling remote work during COVID-19. Forsyth County Schools is actively determining the best way to continue helping students when it doesn’t physically see them in person. To combat this roadblock, all the data, applications, and resources being used at the student level is being brought into Power BI. Teachers can access reports, look through the data, and determine how to help students even when they aren’t physically in the same location.

Even with the physical distance barrier, Power BI highlights students in need, so teachers can flag their concerns and leave no student behind. With Power BI continuing to update data during this time of remote learning, teachers can understand what is going on with students while students are not physically in the classroom.

The Forsyth Technology Services team is also very passionate about Power BI and encouraging other K–12 systems to utilize the tool for their own data. Fleming states that “[Power BI] really helped to change our district and how we reached that 6 percent that was really getting missed.” Forsyth County Schools hopes to create more webinars for other school districts in the United States on how they can use Power BI and Azure to help as many students graduate and succeed as possible.