Panorama Education has raised $12 million in order to better help schools make use of student data and to understand its students beyond test scores alone.

"Schools are required to track a standard set of data by law, including test scores, grades, and attendance records. Panorama uses this existing data as a baseline for the surveys it runs," said Tech Crunch.

Panorama intends to use the money its raised to help schools use existing data as a starting point as a way to better understand students beyond performance on test scores- a common focus among districts thanks to the high-stakes of testing.

After a district has signed up to work with Panorama, it will select from five different options to determine what it wants to know better about its students.

From there, students within the district will be asked varying questions that will help answer the district's questions.

For instance, a school concerned about high drop-out rates might choose to study student and teacher relationships to figure out how to fix the problem, while "top-performing schools [might] want to demonstrate that their students are well-rounded beyond their test scores, which is especially helpful for hiring top teachers," the article said.

So far, according to the article, Panorama is working with 220 districts across 40 states.

"Fourteen of America’s top 100 largest school districts — including San Francisco Unified, Seattle Public Schools, and Dallas Independent — have adopted Panorama, along with most major charter networks."

Panorama- and the districts partnering with it- hope that the funding its raised will help it continue its work to solve a "broad range of educational problems" by helping schools best decide how to allocate funding as a result of knowing students better.

Read the full article here and comment with your thoughts below.

Article by Nicole Gorman, Education World Contributor

08/04/2015