Youngstown schools deputy data chief to present at SXSW

YOUNGSTOWN

It’s South By Southwest for educators, and Youngstown City Schools' deputy data chief is one of its presenters.

Greg Kibler will participate March 6 as part of a four-person panel on “Analyze, Act, Reflect: A Refreshed Approach to Data,” at the Austin, Texas, SXSW Edu 2019 conference which runs March 4 through March 7.

The other panelists represent the New York City and West Virginia Departments of Education and the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University.

John LaPlante, the school district's chief of information, is pleased that the district's strides are being acknowledged.

"I'm excited to see conferences such as SXSW recognize the tremendous work we are doing in Youngstown,” he said. “Greg has been instrumental in driving our innovative use of data for the improvement of our teaching and learning processes, so I'm not surprised with his selection to co-present this session at one of the premier education conferences in the country."

The panel session grew out of The Strategic Data Project, a two-year program through Harvard University’s Center for Education Research that aims to strengthen the capacity of education agencies to use data for improvement.

As part of that program, Kibler and LaPlante have been working with people from different agencies to bolster the use of data to make change in the district.

In addition to Kibler, the group consists of Josh Dormont from New York City Department of Education and Oliver Ho from West Virginia Department of Education with Rebecca Marshall from the Center for Education Policy and Research at Harvard as moderator.

The session “is designed for our panel to share our stories and practices in making an impact on our institutions,” the deputy data chief said. “We each work with different entities: a small urban city, a large urban city, and a rural state, and we are all at different places of progress, but we all are utilizing data and practices around data to make a positive impact.”

One example of how YCSD has used data to make improvements is the five-week reviews. They review attendance, behavior, grades, benchmark assessments and even instructional quality.

“From this review process, we are able to monitor how our buildings, teachers and students are progressing through the year rather than waiting to intervene at the end of the year,” Kibler said. “Two years ago, this data was very high level and not readily available. But now we are able to provide this to our educational leaders quite quickly and accurately. This has made helped leaders make a difference.”