Increasing Graduation Rates and Improving College Readiness for High School Students

Fellows: Everaldo Aguiar, Nasir Bhanpuri, Himabindu Lakkaraju, David Miller
Data Science Mentor(s): Ben Yuhas
Project Partner: Montgomery County Public School District
[Github Repository]

To ensure that all students are on track for success beginning in the primary years, Montgomery County Public Schools in Rockville, Maryland built their own “early warning” model to identify students who are not making sufficient academic progress using data on grades, attendance, and other measures.

In 2014, we helped the MCPS administrators validate and improve their model, using new sources of student-level data. In addition, looked to broaden the objective to look at other measures of academic success.

This DSSG project built upon our work with Mesa Public Schools in 2013, which sought to identify students not achieving their college potential. Each year across America, students consistently under-enroll in colleges – leading to lost college potential. With help from DSSG, MCPS now has the tools to improve the college attendance rate of its students and the caliber of institutions they attend.

You can read about this project in detail here and access our github repository here.