Prince George’s County Public Schools officials are looking to use data to quicken students’ academic growth.

PGCPS interim superintendent Shawn Joseph shared his initiative to make school data dashboards transparent and available for everyone at a town hall meeting last week. He also pushed for community members to acknowledge the growth that the data shows in the school system compared to statewide measurements.

“All children have greatness and giftedness in them, but it takes the school system to pull it out,” Joseph said. “We’ve got to create the conditions.”

Joseph said the U.S. problematizes Black and brown communities and focuses on deficits in data, which ignores opportunities and great progress. He said he and his team are committed to looking at data from an “equity lens” by comparing students with their peers from similar groups rather than in a “one size fits all” angle.

The data Joseph presented at the town hall showed that while the county’s students lag behind in the state’s overall performance, more than 85 percent of the students are performing the same or higher than their like-peers across the state. He said the school system can use data to compare Black students in the county to all Black students in Maryland.

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The data indicated that students of color and multilingual students outperformed their like-peers statewide, he said.

In 2024, Black students in the county outperformed their peers in the state by 4.3 percentage points in English Language Arts and 1.9 percentage points in mathematics, Joseph said. Hispanic and Latino students outperformed their like-peers by 1.9 percentage points in English Language Arts and 1.2 percentage points in mathematics, he added.

At-large Prince George’s County Council member Calvin Hawkins II said looking at data from like-peers will help students, parents and the entire community look at schools in the county differently.

Hawkins said since he has been involved in public service in the county, he never looked at data in the way Joseph presented. This new perspective was important to him because it positively changed his outlook.

“If we’re not careful, we’ll stay engaged in the negative things and miss all the good and positive things that are going on in our school system,” Hawkins said.

Joseph said he and his team have been working on being transparent in using data to make important decisions. The plan is to turn the data into public dashboards to show if schools are making adequate growth in reading and mathematics.

Hawkins said he respects Joseph’s plans to use data to direct resources to schools that are in need of them.

“It would help our leadership, that’s including Dr. Joseph, and our educators and management team members understand through that data, where the challenges are,” Hawkins said.

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The statistical analysis will allow for Joseph’s team to focus on the schools that are not improving academically.

Doug Strader, PGCPS’s chief accountability officer said during a Board of Education meeting Thursday that the dashboards will show growth at a district level and school level using various methods, including looking at the Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program test results to view growth.

Other progress metrics will include truancy, suspension rates, enrollment rates and demographic information from each school, Strader said.

The dashboards will “highlight academic outcomes and school climate measures, with an emphasis on growth and gains demonstrated by schools,” according to a PGCPS news release.

“We’ve got tremendous staff, we’ve got a tremendous community, but we’ve just got to come together and work together and seek what’s at work in a way that really accelerates opportunities and access for children,” Joseph said.