Position Summary

New Visions for Public Schools develops and implements scalable approaches to achieving equitable outcomes for students in New York City’s public schools. We currently support nearly 350 public schools that serve over 180,000 students. Our digital products help simplify complex managerial challenges so that school leaders and educators can focus on supporting their students to graduate high school prepared to succeed in college and careers.

The School Systems and Data Analytics department is at the core of supporting New Visions staff and schools in translating data into action. Multiple times per day, we manage the processing of data from multiple internal and external source systems into New Visions databases and into live tools, providing staff with actionable, timely, and accessible information to make data-informed decisions.

We are looking for an experienced and thoughtful data practitioner to join our growing Data Analytics team as Lead Data Analyst. A key strategic partner to the Director of Data Analytics, you will help fundamentally shape our data products and impact the outcomes of hundreds of thousands of students, teachers, and parents across New York and beyond. As we continue to expand our reach, this position offers a significant leadership and growth opportunity for a candidate with a strong analytic and management skill set eager to advance analytic work in supporting the nation’s largest public school system.
Who You Are

You are passionate about mission-driven technical work that has a tangible impact on opportunities and outcomes for young people

You are a strategic and analytical thinker with a natural curiosity for investigating issues and communicating insights

You are detail-oriented with a commitment to data quality and accuracy. You value the nuts and bolts of data work, including organizing and cleaning data as well as generating descriptives.

You are a creative problem-solver, thoughtfully considering and weighing a set of options to address any given challenge

You are collaborative and team-oriented with a strong sense of collective responsibility

You are dedicated to continuous learning and skill-building, seeking out opportunities to develop your own new skills and to mentor team members in their professional growth
What You’ll Do

You’ll work with the Director of Data Analytics and key stakeholders throughout the organization to craft and deliver our analytic strategy, including providing descriptive analyses, uncovering trends, identifying missed opportunities, and discovering successful practices within our schools. In collaboration with our Lead Architect, you’ll develop our data model to support your analyses and advise how it can best support monitoring of student outcomes and the longitudinal and predictive modelling work you’ll undertake as part of our strategy. You’ll build the capacity of your analytic team to translate the analytics findings into usable data products.

Your day to day work will include writing scripts in R, Python and/or SQL to further your analyses and augmenting our underlying data model; meeting with leaders throughout New Visions and external to the organization to understand requests and explain findings; and supporting team members to further our analyses and turn them into visual products. You’ll have the dedication to implement a strategy over weeks and months, and the flexibility to adapt to the needs of the team and the organization. You’ll position your work within our Agile workflow to better coordinate with other team members.

You’ll play a key role in our internal evaluative work, developing and implementing models to understand the performance of our organization and of our schools, working with stakeholders within the School Support department to deliver the results and interpret findings. You’ll also be expected to represent our work with external audiences and build partnerships with organizations in our field.

You will create products from your analyses, which may take the form of analytic briefs or interactive dashboards. Your initial work will likely focus on providing accurate and clear descriptives regarding student performance to programmatic leaders, and from there you’ll be asked to conduct increasingly sophisticated analyses that allow us to predict outcomes and reliably evaluate our own impact.
Required Knowledge and Skills

• Master’s Degree in related field
• 5+ years experience in applied research and/or data analytics
• Proficiency in R, Python and/or SQL required
• Exceptional strategic, analytical, and critical thinking skills
• Strong project management and organizational skills with close attention to detail
• Experience managing an effective team
• Excellent written and oral communication skills
• Demonstrated ability to prioritize, multi-task, work under pressure and meet deadlines
• Demonstrated persistence and independence in learning technical subject matter and in solving technical problems

Desired Knowledge and Skills

• Experience working in AWS or other distributed computing environments
• Git
• Tableau
• Experience with agile project management
• Program evaluation methods
• Knowledge of public education data in New York State