Social discussion of CS in K-12

[Charles Schultz <sacrophyte AT gmail.com>]

Yo, Shifters!

At Monday's school board meeting, there is an item to request approval for a piece of software that acts as a tool to consolidate and analyze information and help administrators make decisions. Among the many buzz-words, we call this "data driven decisions" and "business intelligence". I cannot deep-link the agenda item (right, David?), so I will copy portions here.

Before I paste, here are my questions:

1. Do we have too much data in the first place? Apparently we have more than we can handle presently
   
2. "School" is becoming more and more like a business; is this a bad thing?
   
3. Crikey, $50,000/year for upkeep and maintenance!?!? Is this the best we can do?

I am not a teacher, but I do have a career in Information Technology; I understand the jargon, I see the trends. But what is truly best for our students? I firmly believe that what is best for our students is also best for our society.

Here is the excerpt from the school board agenda:

Right now our over-taxed data team works very hard to get data reports as quickly as possible that help us make instructional and environmental decisions.  Data comes from a variety of sources and often times we spend an extraordinary amount of time getting the right data collected into one file and then even more time creating a chart or table that displays the data in a useful way. This is not sustainable to keep up with the changing needs of 19 campuses and a growing number of programs and activities that require data analysis.  We need our data to start working for us.  We need a better, faster, more robust, instantly customizable, constantly updated data repository that gives us reports and analysis so we can make timely decisions for our students’ academic and social well-being.

FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS:

The software (including set up/training) costs $252,000.  The annual fee of $50,000 covers ongoing upkeep and necessary changes.   

Data Driven Graduation White Paper (2).pdf (552 KB)

DecEd_Decatur CS (2).pdf (205 KB)

VoicesfromDistrict (2).pdf (193 KB)

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Charles Schultz