Open Data Index for Schools

Traditionally in education, student need is measured by eligibility for free and reduced-price lunch, but a stronger picture of what challenges are faced by school communities is needed. Introducing ODIS.

Innovation and Products / Open Data Index for Schools (ODIS)

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A New Way to Measure Student Need

Many factors can become barriers to students achieving their full potential. That’s why NAF created the Open Data Index for Schools (ODIS), a free, first-of-its-kind open data resource that provides insights into a spectrum of community barriers facing 23,000+ high schools across the United States.

How You Can Use ODIS to Help Students Succeed

ODIS enables users to examine the community stress factors present including economic, education, health, housing, and crime, by combining 17 indicators of quality of life using publicly available data to better target appropriate support for historically marginalized school communities and students and families living in them.
You can manipulate the tool in many ways to compare data across school districts, cities, counties and state levels. This tool is useful for a variety of purposes to support work in driving improvements in quality of life and better outcomes for students.
Here are a few ways:

School and Educational Leadership, Nonprofits, and Community Impact Organizations

ODIS can support in providing data-driven metrics on a broad spectrum of community barriers for programmatic intervention, soliciting grant funding, and strategizing the allocation and management of resources.

Corporate and Local Employers

ODIS provides targeted metrics on widespread community barriers that business partners to tackle together (for example, access to broadband internet), and can assist in the tracking of these metrics over time.

Policymakers

Examine the impact of community and policy-based initiatives. ODIS conveys data on key areas of community barriers and stress by combining 16 indicators of quality of life; such as, unemployment rate and housing affordability.

Researchers

You’ll have access to freely available, synthesized, and updated data specific to school communities, at the local or national level, to facilitate trend analysis, statistical comparisons, and bridging research with community impact.

"Currently, Project Invent is working to bring the Project Invent experience to every high school and middle school beginning with students furthest away from opportunity. The ODIS tool will help us identify which schools and communities can benefit from our programming and receive additional support from our team for implementation and student impact."