Infinite Campus Heartburn Continues

State’s student tracking software has major problem

Infinite Campus is the new student tracking software program that the Kentucky Department of Education just brought on line.

– Well, sort of.

It turns out the software is fouling up the calculation of absolutely critical average daily attendance figures for every school district in Kentucky.

Those figures are essential because a significant amount of the money that each district gets from the state is determined from them.

Henry County Schools superintendent Tim Abrams indicated to his board that they need to get this fixed by May 30th to stay on track for submitting next year’s budget.

Right now, just in Henry County they get numbers anywhere from 1920 to 2000 when they run the average daily attendance calculation. That 80 student difference might not sound like a lot until you realize this is just for one district, and with current state revenue for Henry County running $5,440 per pupil, the difference could change what this small district gets by nearly half a million dollars next year.

Chalk another one up for “Infinite Heartburn.”

Infinite Campus Student Software Security Issue?

Student changes grades in a school’s computers

The Courier-Journal is reporting on a student who is being denied access to her graduation ceremonyafter she conspired with another student to change grades in the Jeffersonville High School’s computer system.

While this incident apparently took place up in Indiana, it provides another case in point that some students will work very hard to compromise computer systems – especially those that have things like their grades in them – and there is a history of students sometimes succeeding.

We need to insure that Kentucky’s new Infinite Campus computer system, which now tracks student grades here, is more robust than the system used in Clark County, Indiana. Infinite Campus holds a lot more sensitive information besides just student grades, and a compromise could have serious consequences for parents as well as their student children.

(Corrects earlier version of this post which assumed the high school in question was in Kentucky as the Courier article did not identify the state where the school is located)

Does Infinite Campus Cause NCLB Scoring Errors?

Monday, September 28, 2009

NCLB Scoring Errors?

The new Kentucky No Child Left Behind (NCLB) scores for 2009 have been out less than a week, but at least two school districts are already questioning their reports.

The most recent situation was covered by the News-Graphic from Georgetown. Under the title,“Schools score 94.7 percent, fail No Child Left Behind” (Subscription), the newspaper includes comments that the Scott County Public School District found mistakes in the number of its learning disabled students in the new report.

Per Scott County, the NCLB report shows 188 more learning disabled students than are actually in the system. I calculate that figure would be more than 30 percent too high, based on the number of learning disabled students in the system one year earlier.

This error could point to a number of problems, but the leading suspect at this point is the Infinite Campus student tracking computer program. This is a program with teething pains, as we have noted before.

Scott County isn’t the only school district with concerns. The first school system to question the new NCLB results is the Barren County School District. According to the Glasgow Daily Times, the district’s director of Instruction and Techonology, Benny Lile, spotted some “discrepancies” which the paper didn’t discuss further.

I called Mr. Lile, who has a long history of service to state education as the past chair of the statewide School Curriculum, Assessment and Accountability Committee. He indicated the problem in Barren County also concerns questionable numbers of students who were reported as learning disabled.

It will be interesting to see if more districts have similar problems.

As an aside, I also talked to Mr. Lile about how Barren County is handling the new testing data. He is going to be doing a good job with that task. His district will take a detailed look at the data broken down by individual test and by student subgroup performance. I think that is exactly what the legislature intended when they disbanded the CATS accountability system with its overly simplistic single-score-for-everything approach, which just wound up hiding lots of problems.

Lile’s district isn’t going to do anything with the unofficial, CATS-like number called the “Transition Index” that a consortium of private groups concocted this year. Lile recognizes that single number can hide all sorts of underlying problems and mostly just serves to confuse the public about what is really going on in their public schools.