Schools for Tomorrow Blog

Memo to Colorado legislators: Be very, very careful about assigning any new data collection duties to the Colorado Department of Education in 2008 - it looks like CDE has more than enough work to do cleaning up its current data systems.

Review of CDE data systems was mandated by HB 07-1270. Consultant North Highland of Atlanta finished its report Nov. 30, and the department announced it with a brief news release on Monday.

Much of the 186-page report is intelligible only to a systems administrator, including the charts showing tiny computers and servers connected by lines, with an occasional fat blue stick figure holding his arms wide (perhaps in frustration?) in the middle of the diagram.

Once you get past the technical details, it isn’t pretty reading.

“Currently, the data collection process is fragmented, contains redundancies across data collections and does not involve the stakeholders. This lead to confusion, problems with submissions and data collection windows, and complaints by school districts. Each program unit in CDE conducts all aspects of the data collection process differently. There is no consistency in requirements management, stakeholder involvement, communications, training or support, which leads to duplication of efforts.” (A data collection window apparently is the period of time in which a school district has to submit a particular set of stats.)

In other words, nobody’s in charge.

Here are some other interesting points:

“There is no consolidated view of all the collections at CDE and the impact on resources and prioritization.”

“There is not a consistent approach or methodology used to gather and document data collection requirements for state and federal education mandates.”

“Each program unit approaches the legislative interpretation, requirements analysis, communication, training, implementation and support in a different manner. This lead to confusion at the school district level and inconsistency within CDE.”

The consultant’s report noted that it was working on a tight schedule, so specific recommendations for change will require more detailed analysis. But, the report does recommend creating “a Data Program management Office (PMO) to oversee the entire data collection process from legislation to implementation to collection execution.”

Also, “It is recommended that CDE take a comprehensive view of the data that is collected and the reports that are generated and work with the legislature and other stakeholders to determine if the data answers the questions as originally intended.” (Translation: Find out if the department is collecting data that nobody uses.)

“The data collection and reporting efforts must be viewed as a whole system, not independent collections.”

The report did suggest some short, medium and long-term fixes. It put a price tag of $2-3 million on longer-term upgrades.

The report catalogued more than 100 different data collections that the department runs every year. One interesting tidbit: Data on out-of-district pupils is still being submitted on diskettes that are sent back and forth between districts and CDE.

If you’re up to digging into something that’s harder to read than a Microsoft manual, click here.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 10th, 2007 at 11:25 pm and is filed under CDE and state board of ed.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.