Director of Data & Assessment - KIPP Philadelphia Public Schools

About Us

KIPP is a national network of free, open-enrollment, college-preparatory public schools in educationally underserved communities.  Over 120,000 students attend one of the 275 KIPP schools that operate in 27 regions across the United States.  KIPP Philadelphia Schools Public Schools (KPPS) is a part of the national KIPP network and currently leads eight schools serving approximately 3,200 students in North and West Philadelphia. 

Our Mission

Together with families and communities, we create joyful, academically excellent schools that prepare students to pursue the paths they choose—college, career, and beyond—so they can lead fulfilling lives and build a more just world.

Life at KPPS

We know that talented, committed, culturally competent teachers and leaders have the power to amplify our children’s potential by creating a school experience that affirms, values, and challenges them each day. We seek to create a professional environment full of joy, candor, care and community where excellent educators can make a long-term home. Educators at KIPP –

• Are committed to anti-racism, equity and inclusion
• Are part of a close-knit, diverse community of educators
• Show up as themselves, inspiring our children to do the same
• Access resources and affinity spaces that support well-being and sustainability
• Lead with care and candor and take ownership of our children’s learning and growth
• Evolve their craft via 1:1 coaching and quality professional development
• Have access to leadership pathway programming and opportunities to grow their career
• Enjoy a competitive, equitable, transparent approach to compensation, comprehensive health benefits for employees and their families, a 403B matching program, and free access to financial advising services

Position Overview

Reporting to the Chief Schools Officer, the Director of Data & Assessment (DDA) is responsible for managing a direct report and supporting an effective data-driven culture at KIPP Philadelphia schools through the management of multiple components of the assessment and data programming.  Among the responsibilities of the role are: coordinating local and external assessment, ensuring sound data collection and storage,  producing reports and visualizations aligned to stakeholder needs, and implementing systems to produce data-driven resources.  To do this, the DDA will work closely with the Academic Leadership Team to understand the needs of stakeholders across the network and select, build, and continually improve a suite of data tools that empower students, parents, staff, and community members to support our mission. The DDA will also train, coach, and create models for stakeholders to enhance their capacity for evidence-based decision-making across functional teams.

Key Responsibilities

Management

• Manage the Student Information Data Analyst
• Serve as a member of the academic team to support strategic planning and collaboration in the support of schools

Assessment Management

• Manage region-wide support and monitoring of state and other high-stakes assessments
• Support schools in implementing required KPPS assessment suite
• Support academic team in ensuring assessments are integrated into the data platforms so that data can be easily accessed.

Data Infrastructure & Data Policy Management

• Develop, maintain, and improve data infrastructure over time including tools for data collection, ingestion, storage, visualization, and dissemination.  
•  Work closely with the Regional Managing Director of Operations to co-manage our student information systems (SIS, currently PowerSchool), with a focus on functions related to grade books, credits, graduation plans, report cards, and transcripts. 
• Manage the Student Information Systems Analyst to maintain key student data and various educational technology systems that integrate with our student information system (including Mosaic, Clever, Illuminate, DeansList, etc.)
• Collaborate with our contracted Tech Support team and vendors to ensure working connections between systems and to set up/maintain automatic and ad-hoc account provisioning.
• Audit information, correct errors, and build skills in users necessary to prevent future errors.
• Establish and document the policies, practices, protocols, and systems to ensure consistent and accurate data practices

Reporting

• Create Tableau data visualizations and regular reports that answer questions for key stakeholders to provide insight on student, school and regional performance
• Facilitate data analysis by regional and school leaders and staff
•  Coordinate with school teams and vendors to produce and distribute accurate report cards, data sheets, progress reports, and transcripts in a timely manner.

Translating our mission into goals & targets that focus our work

• Consults with the academics, talent, and operations teams to create data-tracking tools & select metrics that are reliable proxies for mission progress (goals). 
• Research & proposes annual targets for school-facing metrics. The resulting goals (metric + target) are ultimately approved by the Site Leadership Team & Board.   
• Consult, research and/or propose key/leading performance indicators (KPI’s) that can be used to monitor progress towards goals during the school year.  This includes developing models that can be used to predict future performance/progress to goal.

Training & Support

• Train school leaders, assistant principals, operations leaders, and other school staff to efficiently use data tools
• Observe, interview, establish periodic meetings, and/or build relationships with key constituent groups (leaders, teachers, operations staff, parents, and students) to understand their experience, gather feedback and prioritize enhancements to systems function, reports, and training.
•  Prioritize and manage relevant support requests and communicate best practices and solutions to common challenges across school sites.
•  Develop reference tools and other resources to support ongoing training and professional development.

Other Responsibilities

• Educational technologies are quickly expanding and have never been more central to our work as educators. For that reason, other responsibilities will become part of the role as they become necessary to meet the needs of our students, teachers and schools.

Who You Are: 

• You have a deep commitment and demonstrated ability and desire to uphold KIPP Philadelphia’s Core Values (Cultural Competence, Children First, Ownership, Community)
• You are someone who has experience with and enjoys wearing many hats related to data, from developing big picture data strategy, to analyzing data for a stakeholder presentation, to writing code to optimize data flow into a data warehouse or a dashboard data source.
• You operate with cultural competence and a commitment to inclusion, anti-racism, and the eradication of anti-Blackness 
• You love data and are able to translate technical language to non-technical audiences 
• You are flexible and able to multi-task within a fast-moving, entrepreneurial environment, while also driving towards clarity, simplicity and solutions.
• You have the ability to motivate, inspire and hold others accountable
• You are solutions-oriented and have an eagerness to adapt in order to solve problems
• You posses an incredibly strong attention to detail and quality

Skills & Qualifications

• Required Skills/Experience:

  • Minimum of 3 years of experience working in the education sector 
  • High proficiency in using Excel and/or Google Sheets formulas and pivot tables to manipulate, compile and analyze data 
  • Experience using Student Information Systems (such as Powerschool) and/or Customer Relationship Management software (such as Salesforce) 
  • Demonstrated ability to analyze trends in data and communicate them clearly and meaningfully to a variety of stakeholders
  • Experience writing and running SQL queries to manipulate data  
  • Experience working with educational technology platforms (ideally including PowerSchool SIS, Illuminate DnA, Clever and DeanList)

• Strongly Preferred Skills/Experience:

  • Experience using Tableau, Tableau Prep, or other Business Intelligence (BI) tools to visualize data 
  • Experience managing and auditing data quality as a database administrator
  • Experience automating processes and managing data with Python

Compensation

• Salary is competitive with other Charter Management Organizations (CMOs) at a salary of $90K+ commensurate with experience. 
• All full-time team members at KPPS enjoy a comprehensive health benefits package (including vision and dental, a telehealth option, and flexible spending accounts) for themselves and their families as well as a 403B matching program for retirement savings. 

Note To Applicants

KIPP Philadelphia Schools is an equal opportunity employer.  Employees are selected on the basis of ability without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, marital status, or sexual orientation, in accordance with federal and state law.