Data quality is mission critical to the success of any major organization. School districts are no different. They generate a lot of data. For instance, they generate academic, financial, staffing, and other data from various functional areas, including transportation, food services, custodial services, and all the other functions of a school district. This data can drive funding levels, funding eligibility, resource allocation decisions, program decisions, and other important aspects of managing a school system. School districts must also comply with federal and state regulations, which requires the reporting of accurate data. In many instances, superintendents must individually sign off on the accuracy of data. (more…)
Several of Gibson’s education researchers will present at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). The annual meeting will be held Friday, April 5th – Tuesday, April 9th, in Toronto, Canada. During our presentations, Gibson will showcase results from four of our recent research studies (more…)
The late Peter Drucker, management consultant guru, famously stated “what gets measured, gets managed.”1 This idea has spawned a number of publications and research into the development and use of key performance indicators (KPIs) or performance measures. For example, a Google Scholar search of “performance measures” alone produces nearly two million results. All of that work has provided us with several generally accepted reasons that organizations find performance measures useful (more…)
Federal and state laws allow many grant programs to pay back a school system’s General Fund for costs incurred on their behalf, but most school districts do not take advantage of this, even though it could mean millions in financial benefits to a school system’s General Fund (more…)
When it comes to providing programs and services to students with disabilities, most school districts in Texas are grappling with a fundamental challenge: how to effectively manage the rapid increase in the number of students being referred to special education for evaluation and placement (more…)