September 2005 — Applications
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Conquering NCLB with Technology
Everett Public Schools taps Cognos to meet state reporting requirements.
Clearly, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act has left schools grappling with how to better monitor student performance, and at Everett Public Schools, we were grappling, as well. Everett is a Washington state public school district comprising more than 25 schools serving over 18,000 students with a staff of more than 2,200 employees. Like many other K-12 school districts, ours faced the state regulatory mandate to submit,on a monthly basis, highly accurate NCLB data to the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction’s Core Student Reporting System, the state of Washington’s centralized NCLB reporting system.
Enter: Business Intelligence (BI)
In light of this requirement, we chose Cognos Business Intelligence solutions (www.cognos.com) to perform districtwide verification of critical NCLB data elements. In fall 2004, we deployed Cognos PowerPlay across the district, enabling all schools and administrative offices to quickly and efficiently access NCLB verification data. With PowerPlay’s “zero footprint” Web application, there was no need for our field staff to install software on their computers in order to access the data. In fact, administrators or staffers who are on our network and who have a Web browser, can get to the application as simply as they would get to Yahoo! or Google.
Still, to ensure success from the start, we required that a Cognos specialist be on site to assist in the installation, configuration, and deployment of the solution, which is connected to our district’s Pentamation StudentPlus (www.pentamation.com) student management system. According to Ken Toyn, Information Systems and Technology director for Everett, this was particularly beneficial in enabling faster and more uniform knowledge transfer between Cognos and Everett officials.
“We recognized from the start that the success of this initiative hinged on Everett inheriting the system expertise from the vendor in as short a turnaround as possible, in order to help control ongoing maintenance costs and fine-tune the solution to best meet our evolving reporting requirements,” he said.
All-Important Training
Equally critical was end user training. To learn how to use the BI software, staff from both Information Systems and Technology (IS&T), and Curriculum and Assessments attended specialized courses that gave them the necessary background to effectively provide training to their end user community. A combination of formal training opportunities, follow-up workshops, and individual sessions were employed to get the end users familiarized with the products, as well as with the analytical objectives developed by IS&T.
This early workforce mobilization appears to have paid off almost immediately. Our district officials are encouraged by the high skill level that the administrators demonstrated from the get-go. And instead of addressing the basics, workshop agendas were adjusted to focus on intermediate and advanced topics to further develop administrator and staff mastery of their BI software.
