The SWIS Ethnicity Report provides your team with the data and graphs you need to start talking about equity. Individually, each graph describes one part of your school’s equity landscape; collectively, they paint an entire picture of how students experience schoolwide discipline based on their race or ethnicity.
For almost 15 years, as the national conversation around race, ethnicity, and equity grew, so did the Ethnicity Report. We added graphs. We provided informational tabs. We added new racial groups. When we saw a place to improve the Ethnicity Report, we always did it. Now is no exception.
It’s time for another improvement.
PBISApps is excited to announce the SWIS Equity Report is coming October 20th! With the new Equity Report, you will get:
- The option to report on three new student groups in addition to race/ethnicity
- A way to look at suspension rates based on any student group
- Built-in data interpretations to guide your decision making
The Equity Report is built on decades of research and the result of months of development. It’s going improve the way you use data to create positive outcomes for all students. Check back here on release day for even more resources on how to use the new Equity Report. For now, here is a small preview of what you can expect.
New Student Groups
Focusing on racial/ethnic disproportionality is incredibly important. It is also important to check in on how you refer students with an IEP compared to students without one, or referral rates for English Learners in your building, or even how you refer students differently based on their gender. So, we added these groups to your reporting options.
By default, the Equity Report opens with “Race/Ethnicity” selected in the Student Group report option. You can change the student group to one of four groups:
- Race/Ethnicity
- English Learner Status
- Gender
- IEP Status
Changing the option to another student group generates an Equity Report about that group. As long as your school has selected to collect any of these demographic data, the option to report on that group will appear in the drop-down list. If one is missing, simply head to School Settings and click General. If any of the following settings are set to No, click in the row and select Yes to start collecting the demographic data you want to report:
- Use Race/Ethnicity
- Use English Learner
- Use IEP
- Use Additional Gender Options (if you want to enable the feature to collect a third gender option)
New Outcome: Out-of-School Suspension (OSS)
Research tells us students of color, particularly Black students, Hispanic/Latinx students, and American Indian/Alaska Native students, are more likely to be referred than their White peers – sometimes up to 4 times more likely. It also tells us some students are more likely to be suspended than their peers. Beyond knowing referral patterns, it’s critical to address the way you suspend students from instruction, too. To check in on your school’s suspension patterns, we added OSS as an outcome in the Equity Report.
To generate a report based on OSS, simply select “OSS” from the Outcome drop-down list and click Generate.
New Rates per Group Graph
The Ethnicity Report introduced the Risk Index and the Risk Ratio. The Equity Report introduces a new graph: Rates by Group. This graph gives you the answer to the question “How often are we referring this group to the office?” Your school team is going to use this graph a lot to develop goals around reducing negative outcomes and increasing equity across student groups.
Interpretive Sentences for Every Graph
When you looked at the Ethnicity Report, did it take you more than two minutes to figure out what each graph was telling you? We developed this report and we still had to remind ourselves every time we opened it what each graph meant. The informational tabs were a good start, but we could do better.
Each graph in the SWIS Equity Report now comes with an interpretive sentence tab. SWIS takes your data and plugs them into a sentence…mad-lib style. The stories your data tell is literally spelled out for you, so you spend more time developing solutions and less time trying to figure out what the data mean.
Composition Reports Available as Report Options
Students with Referrals by Ethnicity and Referrals by Ethnicity are what we call composition reports. The reports are valid, but often interpreted incorrectly. Because they’re valuable to some of your teams, we decided to keep them as a report option you can choose to display or not.
The Equity Report opens with the three most effective graphs displayed automatically: the Risk Index, the Risk Ratio, Rates by Group. These three graphs give you everything you need to make accurate, data-driven decisions. If you want to check out the composition reports, select “Display Composition Reports” from the report options and regenerate the Equity Report. The composition reports display at the end of the report as Students with Outcomes by Group and Outcomes by Group respectively.
Inclusive Language
All student groups identified in the Equity Report follow federal guidelines…with one exception. We chose to refer to “Hispanic/Latino” with the more gender-inclusive term “Hispanic/Latinx”. This change affects everywhere Hispanic/Latinx appears in the SWIS Suite.
We can't wait for you to see this new report and start using it in all your team meetings. Stay tuned for more information on release day!