Seeing every student succeed with Equal Opportunity Schools

Equal Opportunity Schools (EOS) is committed to closing achievement gaps for low-income and students of color.

With Tableau Foundation's largest grant to date, we’ve joined the effort to unlock these students’ full potential.

Tableau is helping EOS find, enroll and track 100,000 high school students in Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (BI) programs across the country. Research shows success in these courses leads to increased engagement and improved performance.

“A student’s high school experience changes who they are,” said Maile Hadley, senior director of programs at Equal Opportunity Schools. “That’s why the lens of equitable enrollment is so critical, especially for students of color so they don’t feel like an exception to the rule.”

Tracking the participants’ progress is a crucial part of the mission, but it’s no small feat. The program is in support of My Brother’s Keeper, a White House initiative, and is described as the largest and most targeted of its kind. This year’s efforts include more than 70 school partners.

It’s about understanding what students, staff, and school systems bring to the table outside the test scores.

Maile Hadley, Equal Opportunity Schools, Senior Director of Programs

To help EOS see and understand what Hadley calls “a ton of data,” Tableau provided software, training, and financial support. InterWorks, a longtime Tableau partner, provided pro-bono product training. And Tableau Visionaries helped create dashboards to track progress.

These customized dashboards have enabled EOS to explore data at not only the system-wide level, but also the school level and the student level. This new perspective has allowed EOS to embrace a more targeted approach.

“The impact was dramatic. That’s why we feel good about completely redoing the way we do analytics,” Hadley said. “Every school is really unique. Our standard analysis didn’t always fit.”

EOS has added survey data to identify each school’s needs beyond test scores, including what Hadley calls “academic tenacity characteristics”—things like grit and a sense of belonging.

"This is going to help EOS and analytics to the next level,” Hadley said.