$40 million dollar solution for $10 problem???

This system would cost about $40 for each of the million or so children in Arizona government public schools.

And of course the system also smacks as a 1984 big brother police monitoring system. I didn't know this but according to the article every child in an Arizona school has a government ID number that follows the child around from school to school.

Source

Arizona education hindered by lack of central data system

By Cathryn Creno and Luci Scott The Republic | azcentral.com Mon Apr 29, 2013 12:47 AM

State Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal has a high-tech vision for school improvement in Arizona.

With one click of a mouse, he’d like teachers to be able to see whether their students are gifted, whether they have special needs or whether their attendance was ever a problem.

He’d like parents to be able to log in to an Arizona Department of Education website and see immediately how their child’s school is performing, if their kids have been absent, or how they performed on any given day.

He’d also like to better guarantee the accuracy of enrollment and test scores that school districts and charter schools need for school funding and will use for teacher and principal evaluations.

But those wishes are a long way — and nearly $40 million — from becoming reality.

For now, districts are hampered by a lack of access to key information.

The Phoenix Union High School District, for example, has difficulty gathering necessary information on incoming ninth-graders.

“We won’t have the eighth-grade kids’ AIMS scores,” said Craig Pletenik, the district’s public-information officer. “Putting students in the correct sequence of classes is critical to their success, and we need to have that prior information to properly place them so they’re not in a too-hard class or a too-easy class.”

Without the student’s specific history, the district relies on teacher recommendations. It also looks at seventh-grade scores on Arizona’s Instrument to Measure Standards, or AIMS, and does pretesting in the first week or two of class to assess the student’s level, all cumbersome techniques.

“If we’d have that data up front, it would be so much easier,” said Juvenal Lopez, the district’s director of human resources.

Lopez saw the need for real-time data when he was principal at Metro Tech, where 50 or 60 schools were represented in that school’s freshman class.

“It was very challenging to get (data) on special-needs students and English-language learners, among others,” he said.

Funding depends on data

In addition to academic data, keeping accurate attendance records is vital because a statistic known as “average daily membership” determines a district’s state funding.

“Between the numbers we submit and the numbers the state will officially grant us, there always seems to be a discrepancy,” Pletenik said.

“There are over a million students in public education in Arizona,” he added. “We need to do a better job of tracking them.”

Phoenix Union currently has five data systems, which are unwieldy and costly in staff time, said Don Fournier, the district’s division manager of information technology.

Yet another problem that weighs heavily on districts is tracking dropouts because they are penalized for students who are unaccounted for either in other districts or in the military.

“If a student leaves Mesa and goes somewhere else in the state, we don’t have a way of knowing that,” said Joe O’Reilly, head of research and evaluation for Mesa Public Schools.

Conversely, if a student transfers to Mesa from Parker or Prescott, educators in Mesa don’t know the student’s history, and requesting records takes time and money.

In the Scottsdale Unified School District, Chief Technology Officer Tom Clark agrees that a streamlined system has the potential of saving staff time.

“The system that Arizona is using is somewhat archaic and, for use of a better word, clunky,” Clark said. “We would like to be able to receive data back from the state in a more real-time fashion.”

Hodgepodge a burden

Although every student in Arizona has an identification number that follows him or her from school to school or district to district, “that still doesn’t mean you have all the information you’d like to have on that student when they move,” he said. [Maybe they should just tattoo the kids numbers on foreheads. Teachers and cops would love that!!!]

His district spends $110,000 a year to maintain its data system Synergy, used by several districts in the Valley, and an additional $75,000 for portions of salaries of people who handle data.

Having everyone on the system could be a good thing depending on what services are provided, he said.

The current hodgepodge of systems throughout Arizona creates a burden, especially for smaller districts, Clark said.

At one of those smaller districts, Balsz Elementary in Phoenix, Superintendent Jeff Smith said a modernized system is crucial.

“In order to accomplish what we’re being asked to do, we need good, reliable data,” he said. “It’s as simple as that.”

“We’re talking about student growth and holding teachers and administrators accountable, and that’s a complicated, complex process,” he added.

Smith gave an example of how the right kind of data can greatly improve instruction. Balsz administrators found that data can predict with a high probability how well students will perform on the AIMS test. Those students who are at high risk of not doing well can join tutoring groups and make use of other resources to bring them up to speed.

In the Litchfield Park Elementary School District, Brian Owin, director of federal programs and student evaluation, sees delays in getting information, for example, on whether a new student has been assessed as a candidate for English-language-learner classes.

Although phone calls can be made to the student’s previous district, that is cumbersome because out of 11,000 students in the district, 750 were tested this year for ELL.

Under the current system, it depends on when the student arrives whether the district has the necessary data.

“If a kid comes in midyear but was assessed the first of the year, we’d be able to see that,” Owin said.

Huppenthal, elected to office two years ago, acknowledges the department’s data challenges. At various times, he has called the current data system “a snake pit, “medieval” and a “mutant organism.” He says it requires 200 in-house “data wranglers” and approximately 2,000 school-district technology workers to make it function.

How the tangle emerged

To understand how the education data system got in such a tangle, one must look back more than a decade to when the state created what it calls the Student Accountability Information System to track AIMS scores and other basic student data.

The program worked for a few years, but was quickly overwhelmed in the early 2000s, when the federal No Child Left Behind law took effect. It required states to collect data including race, gender, English proficiency and socioeconomic status so educators could make sure that no group of students was falling behind academically.

Huppenthal said to cope with the growing demands, staffers employed by his predecessors patched together a piecemeal system of data and coding that no longer does the job.

The problem got even worse as officials began to track Arizona’s growing charter-school movement and the large number of students taking part-time online and community-college classes.

Mark Masterson, the state education agency’s chief information officer, said when Huppenthal brought him on board, the computer code being used in the department “looked like a middle-school student wrote” it.

“The software was built here by people who were not IT workers,” he said. “They made it much more complicated than it should have been.”

Since Huppenthal took office, the department has spent $13.6 million on data-system improvements and estimates it will spend $19.5 million more this year.

Although the fixes will continue to be expensive for three more years — Huppenthal says it will take an additional $39.4 million in that period — he says both the state and schools will save money in the long run by not having to employ workers to enter duplicate data on students.

Little money would be spent on computer hardware — the department has relatively new computers, purchased a few years ago with federal funds, he said.

Rather, it would primarily be spent on contracts with software developers who would build various components of the new data system and an in-house support center. Education officials call this new system the Arizona Education Learning and Accountability System.

Toward a better future

Huppenthal says if his funding request is approved, the new system will be fully developed in five years.

The system would contain all the information needed for school districts to enroll new students and get accurate per-pupil funding from the state — plus information about school performance, teacher performance and student data including attendance, grades, standardized test scores and special-education status.

Teachers and principals would have access to student data — including attendance records from every public school in Arizona, AIMS test scores and other measurements, including those for students who are gifted or in special education.

Currently, it can take weeks to track down such information about a student when he or she enrolls in a new school.

A similar “dashboard” would allow parents to log in and see how their kids performed on a test or whether they were in school that day. The public also would have access to parts of the system that show overall school data, such as test scores.

The new system also would allow students, parents and teachers to see state standardized-test scores instantly, he said. Under the current system, AIMS scores are not received until summer — too late for remedial work before the start of the next school year.

“Right now, students and teachers want their scores, but there is a burlap sack over the scoreboard,” Masterson said.

Department of Education officials say that they have looked at data systems in many other states. Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia and Washington, D.C., are said to have well-developed systems.

In Colorado, for instance, parents, students and educators may access information about a school’s finances, classes offered, number of highly qualified teachers, enrollment and student performance on standardized tests on a dashboard similar to the one that Education Department staffers envision.

But Huppenthal says no other state so far has as comprehensive a system as the one he and his staff have planned.

Vision far from reality

While state lawmakers agree that Arizona needs better education data, some think a new system could be developed faster and cheaper by outside contractors.

Sen. Kimberly Yee, chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee, likes the idea of putting the data system entirely out to bid by private software developers.

Since most other states are developing similar systems in response to demand for school data, why not try to find a program “off the shelf”? she wonders.

“I am absolutely in support of upgrading our archaic system. It is quite broken-down,” Yee said. “But to fix this, we need a system that has already been tested. There may be something available right now.”

Gov. Jan Brewer, meanwhile, likes much of Huppenthal’s proposal but thinks the data system can be improved faster and cheaper.

She included $7 million for data-system improvements in her budget plan this year and would like to see the Arizona Department of Administration manage the funds.

Under her plan, the two state agencies together would select an outside vendor to run a public interface similar to Service Arizona, the state’s system for vehicle licensing.

Rebecca Gau, director of the governor’s Office of Education Innovation, said the Administration Department was selected to team with the Education Department because it has more experience with technology procurement.

Brewer’s plan has the support of Expect More Arizona, a non-profit education-reform group that is supported by a number of major Arizona businesses, said the organization’s president, Pearl Chang Esau.

“Expect More Arizona believes that the $7 million proposed in the governor’s budget puts us on the right track,” she said. “If we don’t have good data in the hands of teachers, administrators and parents, we will never have the accountability we want or see the improvement in education that we expect.”

Huppenthal noted that his staff already is working with four school districts — the Phoenix and Tolleson elementary school districts in metro Phoenix and the Vail and Kingman unified districts outside Maricopa County — to test a “dashboard” that gives teachers instant access to student data.

“It gives a teacher a better feel for the type of student they will be teaching,” said Ed Jung, the Education Department’s chief technology officer and project leader. “At a glance, I can see on the dashboard which students are going to need a bit more of my attention this year.”

Jung noted that the department has spent decades collecting student data that should be put to use by teachers. Walmart, he said, knows more about its shoppers than Arizona knows about its students and schools.

Need quick response

Useful data can be collected, but often its usefulness erodes if it’s not in the hands of teachers and administrators quickly.

This is crucial in evaluating teachers, said Justin Greene, executive director of system services in the Higley Unified School District. State law requires districts to use data that is valid, reliable and timely, and a problem now is with a lack of timeliness, Greene said.

“Students take the AIMS test in the spring after teachers have the kids about 145 days, and we can extrapolate some measure of what the teacher imparted to that student,” Greene said. Teachers have one-fifth of the year left to teach.

The problem is that schools don’t receive AIMS data until the day the teachers leave for summer or the day after they’re gone, and “it becomes a difficult evaluation process,” Greene said. “The state spends millions and can’t give us timely (information).”

Gary Jujino, coordinator of assessment in Gilbert Public Schools, said that this year, the district used the state’s letter grades assigned to schools and assigned those to teachers. So a teacher was rated an A if he or she worked in an A school.

Becoming more sophisticated in evaluating teachers requires addressing certain challenges, especially when a part of it is teacher evaluations by students. For example, some teachers might have up to 150 students and others might have six. One student could have a much greater impact on a teacher’s score from one of the smaller classes.

“We’re trying to address that by using multiple years’ worth of data,” Jujino said, but there can be questions about the data’s integrity.

“The problem is not with the student data that could be tied to teacher evaluations,” Jujino said. “It’s how are we going to tie that with the integrity needed for evaluating teachers.”

Just as important as modernizing the system is making sure it serves the proper purpose, said Andrew Morrill, president of the Arizona Education Association, who says a data system is just a tool.

“Sometimes in Arizona we’ve seen situations where the tool became more important than the system it is serving,” he said. “It happened with the AIMS test in the ’90s, when education was serving the AIMS test rather than the AIMS test serving education.”

Morrill, who taught high-school English 17 years in the Marana Unified School District, said Arizona could commit the same error with a data system if planners believe that simply having data is the same as having a grand plan for what to do with the data.

“At that point,” Morrill said, “we have to ask ourselves: Are we really serving the education system — student needs — or are we serving the bureaucracy?”

Key components

Elements of the proposed $39.4 million state education data system:

- Software that allows school districts and charter schools to collect and analyze information about student attendance and demographics for funding purposes.

- Software that calculates state aid based on the student data.

- Software to let the state administer the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, which will replace AIMS by 2015.

- Software that connects a student with teachers and classes he or she takes as well as allows teachers to look back over a student’s achievement and other data from previous years.

- Dashboards that make data contained in the student-teacher connection software more user-friendly and easier to understand.

- Software to provide support for teachers with test questions, curriculum suggestions and opportunities to collaborate with other teachers on methods to improve student achievement. Administrators can track and evaluate teacher performance and provide feedback and resources to improve teacher effectiveness.

- A security program to shore up the privacy of student data. Teachers and principals could see only their own students’ information; the public would see only aggregated data that excludes student names.

Source: Arizona Department of Education