Critical problems with CA system designed to follow students' achievement

A new computer system, designed to track California's 6 million students individually is so defective, the state's Superintendent of Public Instruction, Jack O'Connell, has all but shut down the California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System for two months while they try to overhaul it.  In a letter to the state's school boards, O'Connell said the deadline for submitting data on school enrollments, graduations and dropouts has been extended indefinitely and districts are only required to report data demanded by the federal government.

It was back in 2002 that the state senate authorized the creation of the California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System (CALPADS) to monitor students' academic progress by assigning each student a statewide student identifier number or SSID.  It was hoped that over time, CALPADS would make it possible to monitor student progress on multiple state tests including the California Student Testing and Reporting (STAR) program tests, the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE) and the California English Language Development Test (CELDT),  even as pupils moved up in grades and/or changed schools. 

In 2007, the state awarded a $15 million, three-year contract to IBM to develop the infrastructure and user interface for managing the CALPADS data, and in 2009, the state began requiring California's 1,000 school districts to submit information about the students in their schools, or lose funding.  According to the CDE website, it is mandatory that all school districts participate in CALPADS, "In order to comply with federal law as delineated in the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), California Education Code requires local educational agencies to use unique pupil identification numbers (SSIDs) and retain all data required by NCLB, including but not limited to data required to calculate enrollment in addition to dropout and graduation rates."

But from the very beginning, school districts, which had to match their own data systems with CALPADS, reported problems.  Furthermore, some districts complained the state wasn't reimbursing them for the increased costs associated with providing the additional information.

Now, Sabot Technologies, a consulting firm hired by the California Department of Education to study the CALPADS project, has given the project an overall score of "STOP - in critical danger of system/project failure."  In it's report, Sabot Technologies, "discovered significant issues with the sytem and project representing a threat to the success of CALPADS from both an engineering and project standpoint," warning, the "CDE must recognize that there is a risk of losing control of this effort on multiple dimensions." 

According to the report by Sabot Technologies:

• The IBM team "is less experienced than expected for a project of this size and complexity," and it is "understaffed to handle the work."

• There is a "distinct lack of technical leadership and engineering resources on the California Department of Education side of the project."

• "There are simply  not enough capable labor resources to perform all of the required tasks and/or perform quality assurance activities."

The California Longitudinal Pupil Achiement Data System has been touted as the nation's largest database of information on individual students.  By collecting information on demographics, student grades and test results, course enrollments and completion and discipline incidents, it was hoped that CALPADS would be able to provide answers to important policy questions such as who drops out and why, which school strategies work best with certain groups, which university programs produce the best teachers, which high school indicators best predict success in college and workplace.

In January, 2010, the California Department of Education awarded a new contract to IBM to implement an educator-level data system that can be linked to CALPADS.  The teacher identifier system, the California Longitudinal Teacher Information Data System (CALTIDES) will match teachers to students longitudinally in order to study the effect of teacher preparation on student achievement. Once built, the CDE hopes to track teacher characteristics over time, by assigning each teacher working in a k-12 public school with a statewide educator identifier number or SEID.