NAF, a leading national education nonprofit organization, turned to Tata Consultancy Services’ Tech4HOPE pro bono consulting and services program to help improve educational outcomes.
The effort leveraged TCS’ expertise in data visualization technology to significantly improve NAF’s interpretation of complex datasets and make them easier to access.
As a result, NAF has deeper insights into the factors unpinning student potential, enabling them to develop more effective, customized approaches to helping students achieve their potential.
For years, student need in the U.S. has been measured by relative poverty alone and specifically by student eligibility for free and reduced-price lunches, while ignoring other factors. Now, more meaningful and actionable considerations are available through the efforts of NAF, a US nonprofit organization dedicated to student success, through TCS’ Tech4HOPE pro bono services program.
The measure of how many students qualify for free and reduced-price lunches from the federal government has been the way schools qualify for Title I, Part A (Title I) funding since about 2010. Part of the U.S. Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and, as amended by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESEA), Title I provides funding to school districts for children from low-income families. The supplemental funding is meant to close educational achievement gaps and ensure students have fair access to a high-quality education.
Acutely aware that many factors beyond household income and food security are roadblocks to student potential, NAF created the Open Data Index for Schools (ODIS) application. A free, first-of-its-kind open data resource, ODIS provides insights into the variety of community barriers facing more than 23,000 US high schools. The goal of the tool is to improve education and student achievement by overcoming as many barriers to success as possible. With that mandate, NAF turned to TCS and its Tech4HOPE pro bono consulting and services program for support to make data output from ODIS more accessible and understandable.
For the project, TCS Tech4HOPE employee volunteers improved and expanded output from ODIS by creating enhanced data visualizations, resulting in more nuanced snapshots of the challenges facing marginalized communities. More than simply presenting data in charts or graphs, the new data visualizations reveal more detailed and compelling insights about the individuals behind the data. This makes it easier for people of all data skill levels-from beginners to data scientists-to better understand and interact with the information.
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