Case Study: Compass for Success achieves higher graduation rates with IBM Analytics by identifying at‑risk students

Pointing kids in the right direction to change their lives for the better

Compass for Success, a collaboration of 35 school boards and 22 First Nation communities in Ontario, needed to boost graduation rates by giving teachers deeper, province‑wide insight into student performance and risks. To achieve this, Compass for Success partnered with IBM to apply analytics tools — including IBM Cognos Business Intelligence, IBM SPSS Modeler and Watson Analytics — so educators could spot attendance, behavior and learning issues that traditional classroom views missed.

IBM built a centralized data warehouse, ETL processes, data models and reports and delivered the analytics platform via the cloud, enabling deployment in six to eight weeks rather than the years and heavy funding previously required. The IBM solution empowers teachers to identify and intervene with at‑risk students earlier, makes advanced analytics affordable for more districts (only ~30% could previously afford a data scientist), supports the province‑wide delivery to school boards and First Nation communities, and helps reduce dropout risk and improve student outcomes.

Compass for Success

Diane Findlay

Manager