Bento, a free education data visualization tool created by Kitamba, helps district and state leaders understand educator perspectives and use them to drive decisions. With Bento’s easy-to-understand charts and graphs, leaders can quickly view, filter, and compare results of nationally representative educator surveys to increase their understanding of educator perspectives on critical topics like curriculum, teacher well-being, and professional learning.
District leaders can also add their own data to Bento, letting anyone on their team easily analyze internal survey data from teachers, parents, and community members and quickly address their needs.
Making High-Quality K-12 Education Data Accessible and Usable
Bento was initially funded by the Gates Foundation, who partnered with the RAND Corporation to collect relevant survey data on topics like teacher training, social and emotional learning, and standards-aligned curriculum from over 25,000 teachers and 8,000 principals. Through Bento, what was previously a tangle of dense data spreadsheets is now a collection of interactive data visualizations that anyone (not just data analysts) can easily tailor to their areas of interest. Bento also includes a library of publicly available education outcomes data and the ability to share findings via customized reports.
District leaders have emphasized that Bento is a quick way to gauge what teachers are thinking nationwide, compare these findings to local perspectives, and act accordingly. For example, districts across the country are concerned about pandemic-related stressors resulting in teacher shortages. In a March 2022 RAND Teacher Survey, 85% percent of teachers nationally “strongly agree” with the statement “the job of the public school teacher has gotten harder over the past decade.” Bento allows leaders to view responses from teachers like those in their district and contextualize them with relevant data such as average teacher salary in their state. They can then use this information to inform efforts to retain or recruit teachers.
Adding Your Organization’s Survey Data to Bento
Bento can also help organizations make better use of their own survey data. Once an organization’s data is added to Bento, the entire team can interact directly with the data for in-depth, relevant analysis rather than relying on evaluation by someone else.
Depending on preference, organizations can use Bento as a private workspace to view and analyze the data or as a dissemination tool to share their findings with Bento’s large user base of education and social impact professionals. For example, a large school district recently used Bento to visualize teacher feedback surveys about evaluations and professional development to inform future offerings.
Learn More
While data-driven decision making is vital, it is not always easy to implement. Bento provides a seamless way for leaders to access internal and external data, tailor it to their needs, and use it for good.
Kitamba provides demos to familiarize users with the available content topics and data, and continuously builds features to help users explore, analyze, and compare data for their specific needs and location.
For more information and free access to Bento, visit: www.getbento.info
If you are interested in seeing your data on Bento, email Bento@kitamba.com
Kitamba, part of MGT, is an education social impact advisory and products firm dedicated to dramatically improving learning and life outcomes for all children. We believe that great public schools and high-quality education have the potential to be life-changing, especially for students in underserved communities.
