Part Two: Data-Driven Decisions – Detailed Analysis of MCPS Superintendent’s Survey Responses

In part one of this series, we used AI to iterate on the massive number of responses to the new MCPS superintendent’s survey (still open until 7/5/2024). He also shared the full results in an email that you can see here.

However, it was noticed that the word counts from our AI results were a bit off and the report possibly contained some biases. So with the help of The MoCo AI Company, we created our own program from scratch to systematically compare keywords in the survey results (not using AI purely automation).

These were the questions from the survey:

• What should MCPS stop doing?
• What should MCPS start doing?
• What are the great things that MCPS should continue doing?
• Is there anything else you want me to know?

Methodology

Our program looked through answers to each question from the survey while excluding certain keywords that are commonly used, transition words, etc. to get rid of the extraneous words (examples: the, it, he, she, they, then, a, this).

What we have below is the top 20 two word (Bigram) and three word (Trigram) word combinations from the survey that have some meaning. There are some very interesting results and several key issues that pop up in a lot of places.

Notes

As with anything using this large of a dataset, it is not perfect but we went through to try and remove additional phrases that didn’t have much meaning in terms of MCPS. Note that some exact texts may not match because our script combined singular and plural forms of words. The script also validated results using the same combinations.

Just because a word combination occurs under a certain question doesn’t mean we don’t need context of the surrounding words. For example, the word combination could be leaving off a word directly preceding or directly after that would negate the words.

What should MCPS stop doing?

What should MCPS start doing?

What are the great things that MCPS should continue doing?

Is there anything else you want me to know?

Conclusions

We will leave most of the conclusions to be made on your own, but there are some major patterns that are worth pointing out.

Cell phone use and policy is mentioned a tremendous number of times. In fact, 3 of the 4 top Trigram results in “Stop Doing” were cell phone related. Other major policy points in contention make an appearance near the top as well in “Stop Doing” such as the 50% rule, attendance policy,

Special education and accountability topics are a common theme throughout the responses. Central office is also mentioned prominently as was mental health and language immersion.

MVA (Montgomery Virtual Academy) tops the list of things MCPS should continue doing but they just recently voted to cancel the program. It also is mentioned in some other top 20 lists.

Opt Out makes the list a few times but it’s not 100% clear from just this analysis what number are for or against it (It made the list for start doing, stop doing, and anything else you want to know but we need more surrounding language context on that to see if for example those under stop doing mention it like “not allowing opt out” since MCPS doesn’t currently allow it).

What else do you think stands out?

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