Schools are full of data, from attendance records to test scores, but they’re short on insight. And that’s the critical piece for families looking to chart a course from middle school to college acceptance, says the founder of UR Turn, a local education tech startup offering one-on-one education planning through Minnesota school districts.
It’s like stepping onto a bathroom scale, says UR Turn CEO Angie Eilers. The number tells you where you are but not if you’re on track to your goal. In schools, report cards and other metrics track behavioral and academic performance but the data points are disconnected from one another.
“We’re trying to pull meaning out of that data,” Eilers said.
Eilers spent 25 years researching education barriers. She knows the markers that determine if a student is on track or behind on their goals to go to college. But when it came time for her own daughters, then in middle school, to start setting academic goals, she experienced the difficulty of gleaning insight from the array of data available.
UR Turn, started in 2017 with a grant from the National Science Foundation, became the easy-to-use, at-a-glance way to make expert-level data analysis available to all students and their families. This spring, UR Turn is a finalist for the AT&T Aspire accelerator – a program promoting innovation in education tech.
A slot in the accelerator comes with a $100,000 investment in the company and access to mentors and other expertise. The accelerator starts in May and the final slate of startups should be announced soon.
Twenty-one Minnesota schools in 13 districts use UR Turn, Eilers said. Schools pay a fee for each student enrolled in sixth through 12th grade. Each of those students gets to make their own plan based on their own performance. UR Turn taps into school data, analyzes it, and presents it to each student user in a way that makes sense and can inform their decisions, she said. It tracks progress and alerts families early when a trend could prevent a student from reaching their goal. Plans for future development include recommendations for how a student could get back on track.
At a time when the ratio of counselors to students is typically 1 to 500, personalized guidance is difficult to get unless the expense of private counseling is within reach.
“And we saw the worst case scenario … the scandalous use of private college counselor to put a heavy thumb on the scale for college admissions,” Eilers said, referencing the recent college admissions scandal investigated by the FBI. “That’s how competitive things are.”
