Education Data Reporting is Very Expensive, Time Consuming, Important and Flawed in Virginia
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10 responses to “Education Data Reporting is Very Expensive, Time Consuming, Important and Flawed in Virginia”
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Sounds like a job for Virginia’s new chief transformational officer.
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The new Secretary of Education is a leading light in educational data. You are right about the help other Departments of the Executive branch will need.
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The new Secretary of Education is a leading light in educational data. You are right about the help other Departments of the Executive branch will need.
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Good read. Again, I say the present accountability system is too many fruits in the pie. It doesn’t need to have fifteen berries to be a pie. Just one. Cherry pie. You know what it tastes like and you can compare to other cherry pies. Matt Hurt says it well. Thanks Matt and James. You are spot on. Go back to simple accountability with the end results of graduation rate and SOL scores. Less reports. Reliable and collectable data. No one can change it. It is what it is. Keep the main thing the main thing. Periodic quarterly assessment is for teachers, not the state.
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Thanks for the complement. It means a lot coming from you. As a side note, the assessments to which I refer are program assessments, not teacher assessments.
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I was talking about all the VDOE assessments needed for accountability. Program assessment requires ongoing formative data collected at the program level, not the state level.
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I hate to be such a pessimist, because I think you are right about this issue, but the biggest obstacle to it being accomplished is that it is not “sexy”. No politician is going to get headlines, campaign donations, or votes by claiming that II want to (or I put) put in place an integrated data reporting system for Virginia schools.”
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I honestly think that the federal Department of Education will pay the entire bill for the project if asked. If successful, this is a lifeline to improved data without which they cannot do their jobs and they know it.
If that happens, I am not sure that the school divisions will be able to explain why they are against it. It offers to relieve them and their schools of hundreds of thousands of hours of paperwork annually.
The only reason that they can offer is control.
Article VIII. Education
Section 7. School boardsThe supervision of schools in each school division shall be vested in a school board, to be composed of members selected in the manner, for the term, possessing the qualifications, and to the number provided by law.
Well, nothing in this project threatens supervision of the schools in which the data will be entered.
The real reason for any opposition will be that they use data to justify their budgets, and will “fix” it to get the budgetary outcomes they seek. Some divisions do that because they assume every other division is doing it. A daily data entry program at the individual schools that auto-generates reports will not give any division that opportunity.
If you read Matt Hurt’s article that I linked, in the small school division, which are by far the most numerous, division leadership must be relieved of this burden.
Given the authority that the Virginia Constitution gives the Board of Education, I am not even sure a law is required if the federal DOE pays for the pilot.
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You have identified a significant and important problem. You have proposed sensible steps to fix it. I have one piece of advice: don’t hold your breath. I have been around long enough to see these types of endeavors die on the vine.
About thirty years ago, when I began my foray into the criminal justice policy field, there was a dream: ICJIS (Integrated Criminal Justice Information System). The idea was was to do for the criminal justice field what you propose for education: bring together the disparate reporting systems. There was grant money to pursue it. There were staff members at the Dept. of Criminal Justice Services who worked on it. Thirty years later, we are still waiting for that Holy Grail.
The information system at the Supreme Court is a notorious mess. Millions of dollars have been spent to improve it. I was at a meeting several years ago that was also attended by some analysts from the Supreme Court. They complained that the folks working to improve their system would not even let them use parts of it.
It took several years and much gnashing of teeth for the Compensation Board to update the system that sheriffs use to enter data that the Board needs to reimburse sheriffs and provide reports to other state agencies. And that involved less than 150 offices. You are talking about creating an integrated data system which would involve 2,100 schools! And the Comp Board system is not fully integrated with other state systems such as CORIS and with DCJS, which uses its data, because the Comp Board wanted to “protect” its data.
To accomplish what you propose will take strong, dedicated leadership from the Governor and the Dept. of Education. That leader will have to sell, plead, and, if necessary, bully, the various jurisdictions into agreeing to participate in the system. Someone has got to take the lead in deciding what will be included, how it will be coded, and a thousand other issues. Don’t forget that you are dealing with 132 school districts, each of which claims some degree of autonomy, along with almost 2,100 schools, the actual data entry points and probably at least 5,ooo folks who actually enter the data.
After the system is developed and installed, there will be a continuing task of maintenance and training local staff in order to maintain consistency.
Finally, it would probably take more than 3.5 years to accomplish this task. For it to reach finality, the succeeding administration has to have the same level of commitment.
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I agree with you on your examples. I agree with you about the time it may take. In the absence of strong leadership from this administration, the project I propose is not worth pursuing.
I took this issue on for a bunch of reasons that I explained in the article.
The one I did not mention is the fact that I took it on in education only because of the strong data quality advocacy background of the current Secretary of Education. If not her, who?
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