Q&A with Bret Kroeger, Director of Data and Strategic Analytics
By Amy Schrei, Director of Communications and Marketing
To help ensure that Tower Hill is making data-informed strategic decisions across all of its divisions and programs, the school has created a new role—Director of Data and Strategic Analytics. We recently caught up with Bret Kroeger to learn more about this role.
Bret joined Tower Hill in 2018 as a math teacher in the Upper School and has also served as the school’s Director of Scheduling and Registrar. He is a member of the Senior Leadership and External Affairs Teams, sits on the Strategic Marketing Committee and is a cross country coach and advisor. He recently assisted the school in auditing its enrollment management practices and is currently leading a review of the school’s financial aid processes.
Can you tell us a little bit about your role as the Director of Data and Strategic Analytics and why such a role is useful for Tower Hill?
Like many independent schools, Tower Hill has been collecting basic descriptive data about our students and stakeholders for many years. One need look no further than the increasingly ubiquitous “By the Numbers” section on any given independent school’s website or admission materials for examples of what I am referring to here.
For example, towerhill.org lists that $4.2 million was provided in financial aid to Tower Hill students last year, and the average score among Tower Hill students taking the AP Calculus AB and BC exams last year was 4.94 out of 5.
These numbers are meant to provide hard evidence that Tower Hill is an institution that provides an exceptional education and is committed to making that education affordable to as many families as possible. But what if it were the case that Tower Hill only asked its top junior math student and its top senior math student to sit for the AP Calculus exams? Would we still be impressed by Tower Hill’s nearly perfect scoring average? The phrase “lies, damned lies, and statistics” is familiar to us for a reason—context matters. It is only when we learn that every Tower Hill student who was enrolled in advanced calculus last year took the AP exam that we can fully appreciate the significance of this AP scoring average and reasonably begin to make inferences about the quality of the math education provided at the school.
In today’s fluid and highly competitive educational landscape, it is important for school leaders to move beyond viewing and using data at the surface level, which can sometimes be tempting when it casts their institutions in a positive light or might help to meet short-term enrollment goals. But to ensure an institution’s true health and longevity, now more than ever, schools need practitioners charged with collecting and analyzing fully contextualized data to better inform strategic decisions. This will provide honest, unvarnished insight into the progress (or lack of progress) they are making toward their objectives and will ultimately help the school reach those goals as efficiently and effectively as possible.
In what ways do you see your current work in this new role moving Tower Hill forward?
We are in the early stages of implementing our strategic plan, True to Tower Hill, and one of my responsibilities is helping Head of School Sarah Baker and the Senior Leadership Team track progress on plan implementation. Tower Hill commits to being “an engaged community of scholars” in one of the pillars of the strategic plan, for instance. What does such a community look like? In what tangible, measurable ways does Tower Hill need to grow in order to embody this vision? To whom or what should we compare our progress, and what are reasonable targets given our implementation timeline and peer schools? Collaborating to answer these questions and using those answers to create key performance indicators and target outcomes has been a focus this year and will continue to be in the years ahead.
In what ways do you see your work having an impact on the Tower Hill student experience?
There are a number of collaborative projects underway that will result in the creation of processes that will help us better track academic progress and skills development as students move from year to year and from division to division, as well as to more quickly identify students who may benefit from additional learning support, for example. These types of refinements benefit all students and will help us deliver our programs at the highest level.
Ultimately it is my goal that Tower Hill’s data culture will continue to grow and flourish far beyond my role, to a point where every member of the community has a level of data literacy that allows them to gain insight into the needs in their corner of the school—whether in a classroom or on a sports field—and has the tools at their disposal to respond where appropriate to the story we learn through collecting, storing, analyzing and interpreting data.
