Agenda Item
a. Approval of Renewal of Renaissance Products and Services: Illuminate DnA and EduClimber (not to exceed $1,200,000)
Summary: Dr. Myisha Warren , Executive Director of Federal Programs, Office of Continuous Improvement (Accountability)
Request: It is requested that the Board of Education approve the renewal of Renaissance: Illuminate DnA and eduClimber for SY 2023-2024 in an amount not to exceed $1,200,000.00.
The requested purchase is a testing expenditure that does not require bid per the District’s Purchasing Board Policy (DJE).
Why: This solution supports the tenets of all Strategic Goal areas, but in particular, Goal Area 1: Student Success with Equity and Access by actualizing the following performance objectives:
Improve student mastery of learning standards
Provide academically rigorous courses and pathways
Increase Graduation Rate
Renaissance’s Illuminate Education is an assessment (DnA) and whole child (eduClimber and Achievement Dashboard) platform with extensive academic content aligned to the Georgia Standards of Excellence with professionally-designed assessments, accessible dashboards, and reports that inform district, school, classroom, and student-level data.
Based on our Vision for the DCSD Graduate and to enhance our ability to monitor birth to post-secondary milestones (which are attached), this platform will afford teachers, school and district administrators, access to a management system that will support DeKalb’s MTSS (essential multi-tiered system of supports) process.
The Illuminate Education DnA platform provides insightful district information around academic data with tools and reports to inform standards-based decision making. The data available through the platform has multiple benefits for District Leaders, Curriculum Leaders, and Teacher Leaders.
Through Illuminate Education eduClimber, schools and teachers can quickly build and administer common assessments with instant access to results, including standards analysis, most commonly missed items, and subgroup analysis. The district also utilizes multiple data points from the assessment platform to design system-wide professional learning.
Accordingly, Illuminate’s eduClimber tool will take all of the academic, social emotional and engagement data from the various and necessary platforms that the District currently has, and transform that data within 24 hours into a variety of formats that helps internal and external stakeholders to monitor academic continual growth and performance of DCSD students, as well as contributing factors to that progress. This solution provides the triangulated data to determine and predict which students are in need of different instructional, behavioral, social and emotional supports at the student, class, school region and district level.
School and district leaders will avoid lag time and extraneous efforts in an attempt to secure and analyze academic and non-academic data, including social-emotional, assessment, intervention, behavior and attendance data by making whole child data attainable and actionable. Pre-built visualizations and dashboards are readily available to assist school and district leaders in evaluation and monitoring intervention effectiveness that leads to appropriate data-driven decision making.
Through the renewal of Renaissance Illuminate Education for SY 2023-2024, DeKalb schools will continue to:
Design common and formative assessments
Analyze classroom, district, and state-level data
Generate reports utilizing multiple academic and whole child (behavior and attendance) data sources
Utilize assessment item banks for remediation, acceleration, and professional development
Inform instructional practices and school turnaround efforts at the local and district level
Administer DeKalb’s Benchmark Assessments
Support Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS) processes
Disaggregate data across multiple sources
Evaluate and monitor the effectiveness of interventions
Collect, report, and analyze school-wide behavior incidents for social emotional learning evaluation
Details: This proposed budget item is requesting funds not to exceed $1,200,000.00 to cover the costs associated with the purchase of the Renaissance Illuminate Education Assessment Platform and professional learning services.
Through the Illuminate Assessment platform, DCSD K-12 educators will have access to over 100,000 Formative, Common, and Benchmark assessment items. The test items have the following attributes:
Aligned to Georgia Standards of Excellence in all four content areas: English Language Arts, Mathematics, Science, and Social Studies
Multiple item types - selected response, constructed response and extended response (which simulates the GADOE Milestones Assessments)
Flexible delivery - items in Microsoft Office Word; passages in PDF; and images in JPEG
Varying levels of complexity- Depth of Knowledge: DOK 1 - 20%, DOK 2 - 60% and DOK 3 - 20%
English Language Arts items will be associated with passages that reflect readability and text complexity appropriate to the grade level
The Illuminate platform includes the following features necessary to administer required formative, common, and benchmark assessments in tandem with DeKalb’s curriculum:
Document camera scanning for easy and instant assessment scoring
Traditional and standard-based grade books and report cards
Online testing, proctoring, monitoring, and dashboards to provide instant performance feedback
Reporting that provides the big picture around effective instructional practices, direction for differentiated instruction, and item analysis to pinpoint student misconceptions
The online portal allows digital access to students and parents to get real-time performance feedback
Additionally, the broader features of Illuminate, are as follows:
Individual Student Overview dashboard: Multi-year student view of academic, attendance, social-emotional, behavior, and program status data for teacher, school and district leaders.
Threshold dashboard: Data dashboard with the ability to screen for at risk students based on multiple data points, set up early warning systems for academics and behaviors, ability to address issues of equity, and screen for program evaluations.
Meeting and Forms dashboard: Customizable smart FORMS that can automatically populate with demographic and assessment data to include embedded action items for student success.
Interventions and Progress Monitoring dashboard: Multiple data sources can be used to identify students in need of interventions and displayed via this tool. Additionally, students’ progress can be tracked to ensure interventions are accelerating learning and closing instructional gaps.
Academic Interventional Analysis dashboard: Provides the ability to view which interventions are being utilized across the district that have an impacting student learning.
Data Walls: School leaders can create and share collections of data with stakeholders and district leadership.
Program Effectiveness dashboard: Helps users to identify the effectiveness of district programming for students in various classification ranges.
Behavior Incident Analysis dashboard: The ability to view snapshots of behavior, response, and behavior locations throughout the district; additionally, this feature will assist with analyzing behaviors throughout the district, drill deeper to understand most common student behaviors, when they occur, where (schools and regions) they occur and which specific students are struggling with those behaviors.
Disproportionality Reporting dashboard: Visualizations that enable school and district leaders to view key disproportionality key data, monitor initiatives, and share easy-to-understand information with stakeholder.
Achievement dashboard: Interactive dashboard that allows users to create customizable visualizations of real-time data.
The tool also has the capacity to publish public-facing data visualizations so that stakeholders can be informed relative to the academic well-being of the District.
Usage Data SY2021-SY2023
Level
# of Assessments Created
# of Assessments Created
# of Assessments Created
2020-2021
2021-2022
2022-2023
Elementary
23251
30298
30526
Middle
7424
10550
10555
High
25445
15284
14069
The Illuminate tool proved to be an invaluable resource for DCSD students and staff.
Financial impact: The financial impact is an amount, not to exceed, $1,200,000.00 for FY24.
The purchase amount will be paid using general funds budgeted to the Office of Accountability, Department of Assessment Administration, charge code: 100.2210.553200.00011.7540.9990.8010.030.0000
Contact: Dr. Myisha Warren, Executive Director of Federal Programs, Office of Continuous Improvement (Accountability), 678.676.0300
Mrs. Allison Q. Scott, Director of Assessment Administration, Office of Continuous Improvement (Accountability) , 678.676.0300
Effective: July 2023
Status: Contract approved by legal
Illuminate Usage Comparative Analysis
Assessments Created, by School Level - 2020-2023 School Years
30298 30526
25445
23251
Assessments Created
15284
14069
10550 10555
7424
6386
4506 4416
2842
617 971
Elementary Middle High Multi-Level Virtual
School Level 2021 2022 2023
Illuminate Usage Comparative Analysis
Assessments Created, by School Level - 2020-2023 School Years
30298 30526
25445
23251
Assessments Created
15284
14069
10550 10555
7424
6386
4506 4416
2842
617 971
2021 2022 2023
School Level Elementary Middle High Multi-Level Virtual
Illuminate Usage Analysis
Assessments Created, by School Level - 2020-2021 School Year
School Level High Elementary Middle Multi-Level Virtual
Multi-Level 2842 (4.77%)
Middle 7424 (12.46%)
High 25445 (42.71%)
Elementary 23251 (39.03%)
Illuminate Usage Analysis
Assessments Created, by School Level - 2021-2022 School Year
School Level Elementary High Middle Multi-Level Virtual
Virtual 4416 (6.79%)
Multi-Level 4506 (6.93%)
Middle 10550 (16.22%)
Elementary 30298 (46.57%)
High 15284 (23.49%)
Illuminate Usage Analysis
Assessments Created, by School Level - 2022-2023 School Year
School Level Elementary High Middle Multi-Level Virtual
Multi-Level 6386 (10.22%)
Middle 10555 (16.89%)
Elementary 30526 (48.84%)
High 14069 (22.51%)
Illuminate Usage Comparative Analysis
School Level 2021 2022 2023
Elementary 23251 30298 30526
Middle 7424 10550 10555
High 25445 15284 14069
Multi-Level 2842 4506 6386
Virtual 617 4416 971
Total 59579 65054 62507