You can’t avoid news about the challenges in our schools in Michigan and nationwide. The reductions in school funding, combined with the expectations of world-class performance, are driving schools to seek ways to be more efficient, yet more effective at the same time. These changes mean the performance tools and dashboards we expect to see in a healthy business today are fast becoming an important part of the lexicon for today’s educators.

Schools, like businesses, are awash in data—data from state assessment tests to a diverse range of commonly used interim assessment tests to a diverse range of commonly used interim assessment tests. Making sense of all that data requires school principals to be statisticians, IT professionals and planning consultants in addition to their regular duties (mentor, administrator, contract negotiator). Schools are data rich and information poor, and educators are hungry for a solution to that problem.

We are very fortunate in the Greater Lansing area to have many educators who are passionate about helping schools with these challenges. At the same time we are enjoying the creation and growth of high-tech small businesses. The four-year-old Red Cedar Solutions Group brings these two worlds together by combining their new school performance management tool, Orange Grove, developed by engaging educators’ passion for improving schools.

Orange Grove is an online software tool designed to help schools identify their biggest opportunities for improvement and to use more than gut feelings to determine what’s working and what isn’t in a school improvement plan. Orange Grove has taken all of the lessons and best practices the education experts at Red Cedar Solutions Group have developed and refined over the years with some of Michigan’s highest performing, as well as some of the most troubled, schools and moved them into an online solution that provides those tools and support to schools across Michigan and the United States.

How does it work?

Gather

Orange Grove helps schools gather all their diverse school performance data in one place, and they don’t need in-house IT support to do it. All data are securely stored and can be accessed by teachers and school improvement teams online from anywhere, anytime.

Study, no statistician required

Once schools have their data all in one place, Orange Grove provides fast, comprehensive analysis. Complex analytics are easy-to-read, easy-to-understand data visualizations that make relationships obvious. Orange Grove also makes it simple to share meaningful insights with anyone involved in the school’s improvement activities.

Plan

Orange Grove facilitates objective, data-driven school performance and improvement planning. This includes helping the school through the process of developing and writing goals, objectives, action plans, mission and vision statements. Educators and school improvement teams have found that one of the greatest values Orange Grove brings is that it turns plan back into a verb, a process greater than the demand of submitting the school improvement plan.

Do: bridging the knowing-doing gap

Orange Grove schools drive school performance management through their ongoing school improvement activities. The Do stage is the process of executing and reviewing the school’s action plan and the resulting high performance activities. Evaluating the effectiveness of the plan then provides the feedback loop—causing educators to rethink their goals, objectives and plans for appropriate modifications. This is what makes the school improvement planning a continuous process. By significantly reducing the time schools spend on data acquisition, analysis, visualization and sharing, Orange Grove assists schools with critical, student-centered performance activities.

The Gather, Study, Plan, Do is a cyclical process, similar to the Plan-Do-Study-Act of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. For continuous school performance improvement the process never stops. It is this type of innovation, with an emphasis on quality and constant upward velocity that will help our educational system serve our most valuable resource—the next generation.

		Adrian Bass is a quality consultant and lifelong learner, who believes that learning is a prerequisite for quality improvement. She is a board member and volunteer for Capital Quality and Innovation (CQI) and a part-time instructor at Lansing Community College.