The key to schools’ success? California startup says ask the students.

As school districts across the Bay Area and California struggle with ballooning budget deficits, declining enrollment and lagging math and reading scores, one California startup says they have the key to success: student feedback.

Parsec Education, a K-12 data analytics company based in Fresno, is working with school districts, county offices of education and charter schools across California to help schools understand and use data to avoid school closures and help students succeed in the classroom.

Babatunde Ilori, chief executive officer of Parsec Education, spoke with this news organization about how the company gathers feedback from students to help school districts make change.

Q: What does Parsec Education do?

A: School systems tend to collect a lot of data but we don’t know what to do with that data. So one of the things we do at Parsec Education really well is help make meaning of the large amounts of data that school systems are collecting.

When I say data, I’m not talking about just solely quantitative data. Most people, when they think about data insights and data dashboards in school systems, they’re thinking about state test scores, chronic absenteeism, student grades. But when we talk about data at Parsec, we’re talking about a broader set of data which includes qualitative data. The qualitative data is critical to improve these outcomes.

And we’ve been seeing a lot of success with our school system partners. We serve close to 95% of the state of California right now, so that is about 220 partners across the state. And about 50% of our partners are charter schools.

Q: How does Parsec Education help schools use data to create change?

A: One of the examples I like giving is one of the school systems we work with had pretty low results and outcomes for African American students. They were reading at the lowest literacy levels out of any student group in this system. And on top of that, these students were chronically absent at the highest rate and then they were suspended at the highest rate. One out of every five kids who are black in that school system were suspended one or more times. It’s pretty alarming, especially when you compare it to only about 4% of all students across that school system were being suspended, but then 20% of black students were being suspended.

So one of the things we asked was, why is it that African American students in this system are being suspended at a much higher rate than all the other student groups? So what we did was sit down and talk directly to the students.

And when we did this, what we found was that African American students basically said, ‘There’s nothing here for us. We do not feel a sense of belonging in the school. No one knows my name. I don’t see myself in the curriculum or the content being taught. I don’t feel like the rules are being applied fairly to me.’ And these were all things that could be changed by adults without spending a lot of money. It was just caring for the kids, getting to build a relationship with them. Long story short, this school system cut in half the suspension rate for African American students within about a year from when this was discovered.

And that’s when we created Parsec Real to allow us to do this more easily and scale it so we can get way more voices more economically than spending hours and hours of time sitting down in empathy interviews with each group of students.

Q: What is Parsec Real and how does it differ from a typical student survey?

A: Parsec Real is a software application that we created because we saw that school systems tend to do surveys with a Google form or SurveyMonkey but it doesn’t tell you what accounts for the results of the survey. Parsec Real is not a survey. It’s really about capturing that raw, unfiltered feedback from students, from educators, from parents to understand what accounts for the results in your school system. It’s a software tool that is browser-based where you share your feedback using your voice, video, audio or text. When you can share your voice and just talk, it’s a different form of communication. You’re just sharing fluidly, so we get much richer feedback.

In the example I was giving with the African American students, we asked the same exact questions to African American students as with other student groups and found very strikingly different feedback. So when we said, ‘Tell me about how you enjoy going to school, what’s your favorite thing about school, what’s an area for improvement at school?,’ those types of questions are open-ended questions.

Q: At a time when school budgets are tight and resources are limited, how is Parsec Education helping schools use data to prevent school closures?

A: I’m going to focus on charter schools because charters are in a uniquely challenging situation right now because there’s a lot of legislation that charters have to adhere to. And they have to get renewals as well. If they hit certain data points on the state’s accountability system, they could be in jeopardy of foreclosure. So one of the things we do is help charter schools share data in a way that’s very easy for anyone to understand. What we’re seeing with the charter systems that we’re working with is that the students that stick with that charter system tend to grow exponentially and they do really, really well. The challenge is that the California dashboard – which is the state’s accountability system – doesn’t necessarily show that. It shows a snapshot of the data and that’s it.

There’s also declining enrollment that is happening across the state as well and one of the things we’ve been doing is helping our school system partners humanize their data by sharing why students enjoy coming to their schools to promote and market their school so that people understand what’s great about going to their schools. When you are able to very clearly communicate how kids in your school system are feeling and you can communicate what a great, engaging environment your school system has, it makes it easier for parents to make that decision to enroll their children.

We’re big on elevating student voices. It’s a very challenging environment right now and I think it’s important to elevate student voices because it does impact their ability to learn and their feeling of belonging.

Name: Babatunde Ilori

Position: Chief Executive Officer of Parsec Education, former Executive Director of Accountability and Communications at Madera Unified School District and former Chief of Staff at Fresno Unified School District.

Education: Bachelor of Arts in computer information systems from Azusa Pacific University and Master of Business Administration from Washington University in St. Louis.

Residence: Fresno

Five things about Babatunde Ilori

1. He was born in New York City but moved with his family shortly thereafter to Nigeria, where he lived until he was 5 years old.

2. He attended nine different schools across the United States up until he graduated high school.

3. He’s a huge soccer fan and played for his college team at Azusa Pacific. His favorite team is Manchester United.

4. He has two daughters and one son and coaches his children’s soccer teams.

5. When he graduated from Azusa Pacific, he wanted to be a teacher but ended up working as a business analyst. He got his master’s degree in educational leadership through a Broad residency — now part of Yale University’s School of Management — and found his way back to education.