July 2005 — SETDA
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Testing the Limits of One-Stop Data Access
The School District of Philadelphia relies on its comprehensive technology solution to make informed teaching decisions.
Under Deputy Secretary of Education Michael Golden’s leadership, Pennsylvania has made great strides over the last two years developing useful informational tools to assist the Commonwealth’s many school districts. While the School District of Philadelphia, along with the other districts, has worked collaboratively with the Commonwealth in this undertaking, Philadelphia has pursued its own aggressive agenda to provide its 13,000 teachers and principals with much-needed classroom informational resources. Both entities are optimistic that those parallel efforts will pay off for all Pennsylvania children.
The School District of Philadelphia employed SchoolNet (www.schoolnet.com) in mid-2002 to provide a centralized database of curriculum,learning resources, assessments, and analyses that could be developed in conjunction with the district’s new No Child Left Behind (NCLB) achievement plan. The NCLB Act has left school districts with no time for wishful pondering; thus, sound, data-driven decision- making is now required if schools want to retain federal funding. Fortunately, SchoolNet’s Web-based instructional management system (IMS) has provided Philadelphia teachers and administrators with unprecedented access to useful student information that is required to make informed teaching decisions.
With more than 200,000 students in 273 schools and a budget of $1.7 billion, the School District of Philadelphia has much at stake. Since he joined the district in 2002, CEO Paul Vallas has set forth an aggressive reform agenda that includes unifying curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Therefore, a core component of the district’s plan has been a comprehensive technology solution which provides administrators and teachers with one-stop access to timely student demographic and assessment data that is linked to the district’s core standards-based curriculum.
IMS Opens the Door to Real-Time Assessment, Adaptation
A critical component of Philadelphia’s core curriculum plan is the focus on benchmark testing and six-week instruction/enrichment cycles, a program which has demonstrated effectiveness in meeting NCLB’s goals. The new curriculum calls for six week units consisting of five weeks of teaching, and concluding with an assessment or benchmark test that emulates Pennsylvania’s standardized testing. Through the IMS process, administrators and teachers (soon, all teachers) have immediate access to test results and can instantly evaluate student achievement and instructional methods. With this information, decisions can be made to utilize the sixth week of the curriculum cycle with either enrichment or remediation activities as dictated by student performance.
The IMS effectively eliminates the lag time in existing standardized test and response cycles from entire school semesters to hours, if not minutes.
