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February 07, 2023

New York City Department of Education rises to the challenge with Microsoft Azure

New York City was an early epicenter of the pandemic, which had a profound impact on its 1.2 million-plus school students. Schools were closed for in-person learning in the spring of 2020, re-opened, then closed again in November 2020. When the New York City Department of Education needed to quickly ramp up their remote-learning capabilities, they built a cloud-based platform on Azure Synapse Analytics and achieved high performance, easier management, and enterprise-grade security.

New York City Department of Education

“It was a crazy time.”

The district already had launched an effort to modernize its IT infrastructure, but the sudden move to online learning was an additional challenge. In fact, only 50 of its schools had dipped a toe in the remote learning pool. Working with Microsoft on an Azure-based solution, the district was able to meet the needs of its students and teachers and embrace the virtual classroom.

“It was, to be honest, a crazy time,” says Zeeshan Anwar, executive director for finance and product engineering in the district. “COVID hit fast-forward on our modernization plans. I think it accelerated things by five years.”

To respond, the district added IT infrastructure to support remote learning and launched a huge device-distribution program to deliver nearly 500,000 devices to students who lacked digital tools. Then they backfilled their IT infrastructure to ensure it could support remote learning and inventoried their online teaching tools to determine which were most suitable.

A growing challenge

One of the big difficulties in the rapid shift to remote learning was finding a way to measure student performance. As the district launched this change, there was no feedback loop. Students might look engaged online but in reality not be engaged. Children for whom English is a second language were especially challenged. Simply managing different learning styles, reading ages, and unique student needs—difficult enough in a classroom—was nearly impossible online. 

Soon the demand for more computing power, higher speeds, and greater data storage threatened to overwhelm the district’s IT assets. Long a Microsoft shop—with SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange, and OneDrive already key components—the district looked to Azure for a cloud backbone that could meet its current needs and help it grow in the future.

“We started engaging heavily with Microsoft to see how quickly we could develop some applications that we needed,” says Anwar. “That included a health-screening application in the cloud and a remote-learning application. We needed to move quickly and have the ability to scale up.”

The pressure was on. “Failure was not an option,” says Anwar. “Everything went remote, and by hook or by crook we had to pull it off. It wasn’t always a smooth ride, but with the help of Microsoft we pulled it off.”

In particular, the scale of data the district needed to manage to gain insights was becoming untenable. “We’re talking about billions of data records,” says Anwar. “Plus, it was unstructured data, coming from all kinds of sources. We asked Microsoft what kind of environment they had where we could store these records in a single place and analyze the data.”

Azure Synapse Analytics is the right solution

Microsoft engineers suggested Azure Synapse Analytics, a set of capabilities dedicated to big-data analytics. Built in conjunction with Azure Blob Storage, and Azure Data Lake, it offers high performance, easier management, and enterprise-grade security—all at an affordable price. Using Azure Synapse Analytics, the district was able to collect information from a wide range of sources: Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google, and even ZIP files. 

In addition, the district deployed Microsoft Azure Purview, a new data-governance service—used in New York in beta mode—that helps map a data landscape and gives users the ability to access data securely. That was an important consideration, given the wide range of audiences the district had for its data.

Says Anwar: “We have a developer audience. And a data-scientist audience. And business and user groups. With Purview, any user base can come to the Data Lake platform and find the data they want, along with its history and its sources.”

“We're taking in data from 600 different applications, plus vendors, so we have tons of data pipelines. Azure Purview gives us a very good way to catalog the data.”

Zeeshan Anwar, Executive Director for Finance and Product Engineering, NYC Department of Education

A full picture of student performance

With that data, the district was able to provide insights about student performance to more than 100,000 teachers and administrators via Power BI Dashboards.

“We could tell a principal, ‘Hey, your school has 300 students. This morning 200 logged into platform No. 1, 150 into platform No. 2, and 50 used both,’” says Anwar. “We’d never been able to do that before.”

At times, the district also used a part-remote, part-in class model, and the data helped them analyze student patterns and adjust teaching practices accordingly. Even school budget numbers are available from the platform. “It’s a single source of truth,” says Anwar.

“Now a principal can log in and see how many devices were requested and fulfilled. They can see attendance trends for in-person, remote, and hybrid models, and compare those to district-wide numbers. They couldn't do that before.”

Zeeshan Anwar, Executive Director for Finance and Product Engineering, NYC Department of Education

A huge win for equity

Moreover, the new Azure-based IT backbone makes it easier to identify student populations that might have been underserved previously. Tara Carrozza, Director of Digital Learning Initiatives, specializes in working with students with severe disabilities and in showing teachers the powerful role that technology can play in helping them. Microsoft’s inclusive learning tools—combined with insights drawn from the data lake—help Carrozza and her peers give students the extra attention and resources they need.

The district’s data hub now gives administrator and educator a central location for finding information they can use.  “As educators, we’re always throwing around the idea of making data-based decisions,” says Carrozza. “But with the new data hub, we actually can do that. This is a huge win for equity.” Educators now are empowered with data-driven insight and can keep a close watch on students who may be falling behind their peers or need extra assistance to manage lessons or remote learning. 

Dan Mehaffey, Account Director for Microsoft (and a former teacher himself), credits the New York school team with understanding the potential of technology and putting it to practical use. “What Tara has been able to do is to make technology relatable to educators,” he says. “The challenge, as we all know, is that teachers work 60 hours a week and frankly don't have time to learn the latest and greatest in technology. They need insights, not data. And I think the real talent is transforming data into insights. That's where this team has been especially effective.”

Partnering for the future

Carrozza is effusive about the help Microsoft has given to the district. “For me, Microsoft has been a wonderful partner,” she says. “I’m able to be honest with them and give them critical feedback, and have action taken immediately. Also, they’re a partner who helps find solutions to any problem we’re trying to solve, regardless of what other products we’re using. Their attitude is, ‘OK, you have that. Is there anything else we can help with?”

New York City schools have made enormous strides since early 2020. In fact, remote learning has shown the district ways to educate that perhaps hadn’t occurred to teachers and leaders. They have seen the strategic value of hybrid learning, the use of data and analytics to drive education, and more. In the district’s plans for the years ahead, technology is front and center.

“With the structure of Azure, there's the opportunity to automate and to make workflows and data available in a way that otherwise wouldn't exist.”

Tara Carrozza, Ed Tech Program, NYC Department of Education

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