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Advanced analytics: Helping educators approach the ideal

Predictive modeling software can help education leaders cut costs, improve efficiency, and enhance teaching and learning

By Jennifer Nastu ( ESchool)

Advanced analytics may help schools anticipate trends that may help school leaders make key decisions.

In the business sector, companies have been using predictive analysis for years to improve performance, predict stocks, or take action and change direction when troubling trends appear. They gather data from a variety of sources and use modeling to pinpoint disturbing developments, identify where things might be headed, and make appropriate changes.
The public sector typically lags behind business: While it has become relatively common within education to use data analysis for tracking and measuring performance at the school, educator, and student levels, far fewer schools and colleges have taken analytics to the next level–using advanced analytics strategies to identify trends that can help predict future performance and help school leaders make key decisions, early on in the process, that can change a potentially unwelcome outcome or take advantage of a positive trend.
But that’s beginning to change. Using advanced analytics software, the University of California system has saved $167 million in the last five years by mitigating risks across its 10 campuses and five medical centers, for example–and the Houston Independent School District has saved millions of dollars in labor and expenses for food service, transportation, and other critical functions.
These are just a few of the ways that schools are tapping into this trend to improve their operations.
Why advanced analytics?
Some school leaders are beginning to realize what can be done with advanced analytics and have started taking data analysis to a deeper level in order to mine trends to their fullest extent.