Strategic Data Project Convening 2026

Session Description: Strategic plans often launch with fanfare but struggle to stay relevant during implementation. Guilford County Schools (GCS) addressed this through its Roadmap to Success framework for progress monitoring and strategic refresh. This session explores how GCS built monitoring capacity and gathered feedback to inform the next phase of work. Using strategy maps and balanced scorecards, we’ll preview how to measure what matters and communicate progress holistically. Participants will gain ideas for data-informed strategic planning.

Intended Audience: Districts, charters or other local education agencies; Data analysts or independent researchers; Senior leaders (including cabinet-level leaders and executive directors)

Session Description: Summer programs offer powerful opportunities to close learning gaps and expand access to enriching experiences, yet districts often struggle to align program goals, outcomes, and evaluation in ways that support improvement. This session shares how Boston Public Schools built a cross-department data partnership to use formative assessment data and comparison groups to understand summer program impact, equity, and implementation. District leaders, analysts, and program practitioners interested in continuous improvement are encouraged to attend.

Intended Audience: Districts, charters or other local education agencies; Data analysts or independent researchers; Nonprofit organizations

Session Description: Districts often struggle to build trust with community stakeholders that their input has been captured, accurately represented, and equitably reflected in decision making. Atlanta Public Schools will share how it explored the use of artificial intelligence to support large scale community feedback, including data sources, validation strategies, and efficiency gains. Participants interested in engagement, data, and equity are invited to join a closing discussion on persistent challenges, including how to better surface and amplify voices that have been historically underrepresented.

Intended Audience: Districts, charters or other local education agencies; State education agencies; Higher Education

Session Description: Many education organizations often treat evidence as an afterthought, rather than a crucial basis for decision-making. These organizations often lack a culture of asking the right questions and relying on evidence for decision making. In this session, participants will identify gaps in evidence use in their organizations and discuss strategies for how to create - and sustain - a culture of evidence and inquiry in their roles.

Intended Audience: Districts, charters or other local education agencies; State education agencies; Institutions of higher education; Nonprofit organizations; Philanthropies and Foundations; Service providers; Data analysts or independent researchers; Managers of data or technology teams; Senior leaders (including cabinet-level leaders and executive directors)

Session Description: This session demonstrates how to automate data pipelines to support advanced analysis and decision making. We highlight a predictive model from Metro Nashville Public Schools identifying 3rd-grade retention risks a year early to trigger proactive interventions and midyear implementation reports from AmplifyLearn.AI for a dozen public school districts on the implementation of the Colleague AI platform. This session will show how even small teams can create reports that dynamically update with new data.

Intended Audience: Data analysts or independent researchers; Managers of data or technology teams; Senior leaders (including cabinet-level leaders and executive directors)