The Central Indiana Talent Alliance recently released its third community report card, revealing an in-depth assessment of performance indicators and trends in education in Marion County.
To achieve its vision of elevating the local system of education, the Talent Alliance acknowledges the importance of collaboration among community partners. It convenes members of five implementation teams (each representing a segment of the education continuum), a data management team, and other key council members to ensure that every child succeeds from cradle to career.
For example, the Talent Alliance, which is chaired by IUPUI Chancellor Charles Bantz, hopes the information helps high schools to see how many of their students remain in college—a measure of how well they were prepared by the high school. The data can also help high schools identify programs and services that correlate with higher rates of college attendance and use that information to improve college enrollment rates among their school’s graduates (Wall, 2011).
It is data-driven in its approach, taking into account data and evidenced-based research to inform decision-making at every stage of the education pipeline. The Polis Center is one of 14 research-oriented organizations that comprise the Data Management Team and we take great pride in our partnership with Talent Alliance for this valuable initiative. Using SAVI’s many socioeconomic indicators and tools to analyze and visualize education trends along with other data resources helps the Talent Alliance implementation teams establish priorities and make data-informed decisions about the education needs of our community.
For example, one of the long term goals of this initiative is to increase the percentage of children and youth participating in out-of-school-time (OST) programs. The OST Implementation Team used community mapping based on indicators of poverty, education, health and public safety combined with existing OST programs to identify high-needs neighborhoods with service gaps in order to target special initiatives.
Reference:
Wall, J.K. (2011, June 30). Talent Alliance to help high schools track graduates, Indianapolis Business Journal, Retrieved fromhttps://www.ibj.com/talent-alliance-to-help-high-schools-track-graduates/PARAMS/article/28028
