WASHINGTON (Map, News) - With the help of $6 million in grants aimed at “revolutionizing” a chronically failing school district, teachers and administrators in Prince George’s County will soon be able to track previously ignored factors critical to student performance.

A total of $4 million from the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation and $2 million from the Broad Foundation are being used to develop an accessible database of small factors that lead to larger success, and strategies for using the data to help everyone from teachers to school bus drivers.

Officials said that although standardized test scores are often seen as the only measure that matters, countless day-to-day measures, from attendance to the progress of non-English speakers, add up to ultimate success and are therefore critical in determining how leaders should focus efforts.

“This is a new way of doing business in the district,” said Superintendent John Deasy, in his third year as head of nearly 130,000 students.

Deasy’s goal is to get away from a broken system in which fear of punishment is employees’ sole motivation, and move to a system where student improvement leads to employees’ personal and financial gain. The data will ultimately help determine monetary rewards for teachers and principals through the school system’s recently announced pay-for-performance initiative, said Don Mitchell, the district’s manager of the grants.

Mitchell, who came from Seattle-based Microsoft Corp., said he hoped the data would inspire a greater sense of urgency in the district. In the corporate setting, “you have to get things done or they’ll replace you,” he said. “That’s been a little different here.”

A similar program funded by the same foundations is in its second year in the 415,000-student Chicago Public Schools, where it has helped show that performance on state tests was no indicator of performance on college entrance exams, indicating the state bar was set too low.

“So now we’re in the process of raising the bar in every grade to realign with” an adequate score on the exam, said Larry Stanton, the district’s strategy director.

Deasy hopes for similar clarity in Prince George’s.

“When I came, many systems didn’t work at all — not even mailing out report cards worked,” the superintendent said, explaining the need to shift the district’s culture. This grant “is what can guide that shift,” he added.

lfabel@dcexaminer.com