Pittsburgh Public Schools has begun using data for transparency and real-time action. Is it working?

All photos and graphics courtesy of Pittsburgh Public Schools. 

These days, data shapes nearly everything from how we shop to how we learn.

At Pittsburgh Public Schools, it’s becoming central to how decisions are made, how schools are run, and how families stay informed. But as powerful as the numbers are, making them accessible to everyone is still a work in progress.

When Dr. Theodore Dwyer joined Pittsburgh Public Schools in 2017 as chief accountability officer, he arrived with a clear mandate: make the district’s data more transparent and more useful. This was not just for internal leaders but for the public, he says: “One of the key aspects that drew me to Pittsburgh Public Schools was the district’s explicit commitment to building transparent processes to inform the public.”

That commitment would evolve into a comprehensive data dashboard system: a series of public-facing and internal tools that now power much of the decision-making inside PPS. The goal is for these dashboards to transform the way school leaders, teachers, and even families access and use student data. 

Building for Accountability

Launched in phases between 2018 and 2019, PPS’s data dashboards were designed to provide a comprehensive view of student performance across multiple indicators — things like Algebra 1 pass rates, graduation rates, attendance, AP scores, and industry credential achievements for career and technical education students.

“The goal was to put everything in one place,” Dr. Edward says. “Before, data was scattered across different reports and websites, making it difficult for families and even educators to track student progress in real time. The dashboard solves that.”

For families, the dashboard offers an at-a-glance view of school and district performance, empowering them to make better informed decisions. For educators, it offers live, actionable insights that can help to identify struggling students and adjust strategies accordingly.

While the public-facing dashboards provide district-level and school-level data on everything from Algebra 1 pass rates to absenteeism, even more is available internally.

“Public dashboards are incredibly important,” says Dr. Dwyer, “but they are one part of a much broader effort to provide actionable data to staff — and to uphold accountability not just to the public, but within our organization.”

Every level of leadership can see customized data:

• At the district level, PPS leadership, including Superintendent Dr. Wayne Walters, can use the data to guide board discussions on student outcomes and base policy decisions on actual performance metrics rather than outdated reports.
• At the school level, teachers now have a personalized dashboard that lets them see their students’ past grades, attendance patterns, and test scores all in one place. Instead of logging into multiple systems, everything they need is accessible in a single view.
• Families can stay informed about their children’s schools, even if they don’t engage daily with the district.

Real-Time, Real Impact

This level of access means that instead of relying on static end-of-year reports, staff can intervene in real time.

Take the dashboard for the Classroom Diagnostic Tools (CDTs), a state assessment used to track academic progress. Principals can now monitor how many students have completed the CDT and whether scores are improving compared to previous cycles. “It allows them to ask deeper questions,” Dr. Dwyer explains. “If math scores in third grade are dipping, they can immediately talk to that teacher, then dig into specific anchor categories and individual student needs.”

The dashboard is built to prompt curiosity. What’s happening in this class? In this anchor standard? With this subgroup? It allows leaders to zoom out for trends and then zoom back in for student-level insights.

Other dashboards track attendance, suspensions, discipline interventions, and industry credentials earned by career and technical education students. Principals can use them to spot early warning signs. Teachers can use them to tailor support, and district leaders can use them to align resources and policy.

“It’s a reflection of what leadership is focused on,” says Dr. Dwyer. “When our superintendent, Dr. Wayne Walters, presents to the school board about student outcomes, he’s pulling from the same dashboards our principals and teachers use every day.”

Making this system FERPA-compliant was a major challenge. “We had to design the public-facing dashboards to show trends without ever identifying individual students,” Dr. Dwyer explains.

Public users can see aggregate metrics, such as how many ninth-graders passed Algebra 1 across the district or what the average attendance rate is at a particular school. But they won’t find any individual names or student-specific data. Behind the scenes, though, principals and teachers have secure access to the deeper layers.

How Can You Use the Dashboards? 

Parents who want details about their child’s individual progress can access their records through Home Access Center (HAC), a separate, secure platform.

Are many families using this resource?

Dr. Dwyer and his team know that many families and community groups do use the dashboards, but they’d love to see broader engagement. “We often hear questions where we want to say, ‘That’s actually right on the dashboard!’” he says.

Part of the challenge is design and accessibility. With a small internal team managing more than 35 dashboards, the district is constantly iterating and responding to community feedback and working to make the tools more intuitive and useful.

That feedback includes voices like Melissa Levitt Seldin, a data professional and PPS parent. While she appreciates the level of detail available, she believes the dashboards weren’t designed with typical families in mind.

“I think the dashboards contain an incredible amount of information, but they are created in such a way that they are more useful for data scientists than parents,” Seldin says. “A parent who doesn’t know how to work a data dashboard would be very confused.”

She recommends a simplified version for families: one where a parent can select their child’s school and see all key metrics at a glance, while keeping the more complex dashboards behind a log-in wall for educators.

Even with her strong data background, Seldin found the dashboard layout occasionally confusing.

“What the directions don’t tell you is that the dashboard is on two pages. On page one, you see district-wide results. But on page two is where you can see your particular school,” she says. “You also cannot compare two or more schools in the same dashboard, which makes it more difficult for a parent who might be choosing between multiple programs.”

She also pointed to formatting issues in the career and technical education (CTE) dashboards.

“The formatting of the labels makes it impossible to read and assess what they are looking at,” she says.

Lastly, Seldin hopes PPS will eventually expand the dashboards to show comparisons across the district, the state, and the nation. “It would be great to also have more comparison opportunities,” she says. 

Another parent, Roxanne Podlipsky, echoed the value of the dashboards but agrees that they’re not always easy to navigate.

“The dashboards contain a lot of data that could help parents make educational decisions. Sometimes the dashboards are missing helpful context, but the data is often in another dashboard. Finding what you want can take a while,” Podlipsky says. “Hopefully, any gaps can be filled as more people use the dashboards and they are updated/revised.”

She also points out a key accessibility issue that limits use: “The dashboard interface does not work well on phones. Improving the site for phones would make the site and data more accessible to more PPS parents and prospective parents.”

The Bigger Vision

For now, though, the district is trying to balance capacity with demand. “We tried to build the dashboards originally with community feedback,” says Dr. Dwyer. “We’re not a UX design firm, but when we get suggestions, we do our best to incorporate them.”

“My hope,” says Dr. Dwyer, “is to make sure the right people have the right data to make the right decisions.”

As PPS builds on this foundation, the district is looking at integrating more tools, making data more visual and navigable, and potentially leveraging predictive analytics to flag risks early.

At the heart of it all is a simple idea: “What gets monitored is what gets worked on,” says Dwyer. “And what gets worked on is what improves.”

The data is there and can make a difference for students. What comes next depends on how well the tools continue to evolve and whether families feel invited to use them.