Case Study: Hamilton County achieves record graduation rates with IBM Business Analytics

Hamilton County Department of Education: Achieving Record School Graduation Rates and Helping Students Progress with Predictive Analytics

The Hamilton County Department of Education, a public school district, needed to determine how to most effectively invest its limited professional development funds for teachers. To address this challenge, they worked with vendor Technology Evaluation Centers and utilized a suite of IBM analytics software including IBM SPSS Modeler and text analytics.

The solution implemented by Technology Evaluation Centers involved using data-mining and text analytics to assess different teacher training activities against measurable student progress. This approach identified the most effective training methods, which contributed to a record-high graduation rate of 84.5%. As a result, the county was rated in the top 5% for performance and the top 10% for progress among all school systems in Tennessee.

Hamilton County

Kirk Kelly

Director, Accountability and Testing