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Minding the Gap: State Cybersolutions to NCLB Mandates

For struggling schools, the demands of the No Child Left Behind Act can feel like being asked to leap across an abyss of potential sanctions. Enter state agencies with cyber-solutions that can help.

By Denise Jarrett Weeks

In the winter of 2003, while the economy sagged and the landscape around Boise lay frozen and snow-capped, the Idaho legislature chose to be optimistic. It was signing into life a sweeping education initiative that would corral and harness school data like never before.

The Idaho Student Information Management System, or ISIMS, would be a centralized system that would manage student information flowing to it from every school in the state. Proponents saw it as a powerful tool for attending to federal accountability requirements—from data-reporting to providing supplemental services—and for empowering just about everyone who had a stake in Idaho's public education.

Four years in the making, the innovative legislation was the outcome of a partnership between the state and the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation. The foundation, which has always focused its enormous wealth in-state, had put up $35 million to pay for the development and implementation of the system, and the state had pledged $7 million a year thereafter to cover operating costs.

This school year, ISIMS is being piloted in 29 school districts. Ultimately, it will synthesize the 17 separate student information database systems that have existed.

"Idaho is the only state attempting a project this ambitious," State Superintendent Marilyn Howard told the legislature in January 2004, reporting that the five- to seven-year project was on track. "A lot of other states are watching to see how this works."

The system is meant to help schools meet NCLB requirements and to give policymakers, educators, parents, and students easy and reliable access to resources and information specific to their purpose. Able to absorb an avalanche of disparate data, ISIMS' synthesizing power accomplishes three primary tasks:

• Student information management (using eSIS software provided by The Administrative Assistants Ltd., a Toronto-based company)
• Curriculum management (using Orion software by PLATO Learning, Inc. of Minnesota)
• Reporting and analytics (using Academic Accelerator provided by CRI Advantage, a software development firm in Boise)

ISIMS provides Web-based resources and tools for educators, families, and the public. Policymakers and the public can use the system to see student achievement information, research data, state and national comparison data, and district and state report cards.

Schools and districts can retrieve individual and aggregate test scores and compare them to national and statewide scores, and they can retrieve data that reflect how well individual school districts, schools, and programs are performing.

Parents and students can access student progress reports, homework assignments, attendance records, and check progress toward graduation requirements.

The ISIMS can help teachers with curriculum and lesson plans, class assessments and progress reports, standards-based report cards, and communicating with parents. Moreover, the system is meant to help teachers make data-based instructional decisions.

Because Idaho has online testing, the results of the Idaho Student Achievement Test can be readily imported into the ISIMS, making them immediately available to teachers. The ISIMS also contains Idaho academic standards and links to providers of Web-based curriculum and assessments. Through ISIMS, teachers can determine a student's learning gaps and identify Web-based resources for remedial instruction.

Last summer, in a controversial move, the Idaho State Board of Education signed an additional $5.03 million contract with PLATO Learning Inc. to provide computer-based curriculum and assessments, to be called the PLATO Learning Network. The idea was to integrate this network into the ISIMS, effectively making PLATO primary provider of curriculum and assessments for the ISIMS.

Superintendent Howard objected, however, saying teachers should be able to access a variety of curriculum providers equally. In the end, the PLATO Learning Network and the ISIMS operate separately. School districts can import individual student scores from the ISAT exam into the PLATO Learning Network. Teachers can then access the network to identify personalized learning paths for students that prescribe PLATO computer-based curriculum for independent study, subject-matter remediation or acceleration, and project-based activities.

While state and foundation money is covering the cost of developing and operating these ambitious online systems, school districts are also shouldering some of the financial burden. And their share can be weighty, says Dawn Wilson, education technology specialist for the Idaho Department of Education. School districts are responsible for upgrading Internet service to school buildings. But few schools in Idaho have the T1 lines that can provide the high bandwidth necessary to accommodate the demands that are now being put on the system by the online testing system, ISIMS, and the PLATO Learning Network.

"It's growing exponentially as we are adding a lot of different initiatives and a lot of different things are coming online," says Wilson. "The districts are saying, 'But we need more money, we need more support to get the bandwidth…to support all of these initiatives.'"

The legislature has begun to leverage state and federal technology funds to help pay for the cost of implementing ISIMS in the districts. Strong preference is now given to school districts that propose using federal funds from the Enhancing Education Through Technology program and the state's Idaho Council for Technology and Learning to cover the costs of implementing ISIMS in their districts.

And there is yet another large-scale initiative underway.

Back in the spring of 2003, with ink barely dry on the ISIMS legislation, the state legislature and Department of Education launched the Idaho Digital Learning Academy—with start-up funds courtesy of the Albertson Foundation. The Academy is a statewide "virtual high school" whose primary purpose is to provide Idaho students with greater access to courses and to give students who've failed or dropped out of a course a means for recovering the credit.

More than three-quarters of Idaho school districts have participated in the Academy, according to the school's Web site. And Dawn Wilson says that the online school provides courses that poor and rural schools often find difficult to provide: courses in core subjects taught by highly qualified teachers, as well as college-gateway courses such as Advanced Placement and foreign languages.