SIRS

Oh My!  SIRS = “Student Information Reporting System”.  New York state.  In our state, we have a big government, in particular a large education department.  New your state is famous for its educational edicts.  Good, yes, bad, yes.  Does the tail wag the dog?  I fear that it does, but i digress before getting into the meat of this post.

Meat of post = how NYS handles required reporting of student data…

The state has a culture of the tail wagging the dog.  State ed is the tail, public school districts are the dogs.

This is not new information.  Its new to me.

My job has veired into data again.  I work with two groups of staff at the BOCES.  Group 1 are “Data warehouse”, group 2 are student systems.

SIRS is the “mandated by NYSED system for reporting public student information”.  Student information =’s student names, school, assessments, attendance, and lots of other ancillary information.

Lets name the players first.

LEAS, level 0, level 1 and level 2 data warehouses or DBs.  The school districts (LEA -local educational agency) works with a local RIC (that a BOCES in NYS).  BOCES are government funded education agencies that assist the public school districts in many ways!  Including meeting the mandated reporting requirements from the great NYSED.

The level 0,1,2 warehouses are also called Data Collections or

The LEA is usually a “student system” of sorts.  That student system in our lovely state is mostly now a software system called Schooltool.  This SMS (student management system – which is a LEA) is built just for NY State.  Imagine that, a system built just for our great heavy handed state.  Heavy handed = mandating reporting of certain data s and how to report them.  Also then tying $ to the reporting and performance.  Buy trying $ to the performance, well now you have a shitload of pressure on the district, its admin and its teachers to perform at certain levels.  When those levels are not meet, corruption is simply waiting around the corner in the form of manipulating results, data or reporting of data to meet requirements…. Ah, but i digress again.

Back to the point

The LEAS report their data to the level 0 warehouse, which is also considered a *local datawarehouse.  Other districts in the area also report their data to the level 0 warehouse.  Data then moved up the pipeline to the level 1 warehouse which also hosts data from other regions around the state.  Think of the level 1 warehouse as a *regional collection of required data.  When data has been scrutinized, updated and *cleansed is a popular term, it makes it way up the pipeline a little further to the level 2 warehouse.  The level 2 warehouse is where the state runs its required reports from.

NYSED basically says work with your local LEAS to get the data into level 0 and into 1 as necessary.  Look at the data, manipulate it, ensure its complete and accurate, then and only then, move it to the level 2 warehouse.

This process is complete and fraught with big challenges.  Data privacy is becoming a bigger one.  As more and more data is *demanded by NYSED, the bigger the stakes in terms of protecting student information.  Our great state just came out with another round of laws around this. http://www.nysed.gov/student-data-privacy/student-data-privacy-education-law

Pressure mounts on the districts (LEAS) to produce clean data as it moved up the pipe from its local system – level 0 – level 1 – level 2.  Big pressure.

Staff in the local districts are assigned data privacy and reporting responsibilities.  New positions are created and filled, but precedence is not really set.  People are figuring out the process and the flaws as they go along.  They freak out a little, especially as data reporting deadlines approach.  Staff from the LEAS call us, my collegues anyway, and say things like

“I don’t see this piece of data or the other piece of data” or “i don’t think this report has all the records in it” or “I think this is what I need, this piece of data, that piece of data”… or “we need this data, a complete set of this data and some of the data is in this other system”.  My colleagues help these districts staff members by figuring out things like

• Where is the data?
• Is the data complete?
• Is the data accurate?
• How do I pull that data together?
• How do I group the data the way its being requested?
• Does it meet the requirements set forth by NYSED?

I overhead a conversation the other day that centered around how to create a complete data-source (set) – file – import file for a new DB instance that was going up for a district.  One of the staff was off to the district to *train them on their data.  Show them the data in the am and then in the PM to work on it.  That’s the cleansing part.  We assume the data source file we created was complete now the staff members need to tweak it.  The db in question would then become the source of the *extract for level 2 reporting.

And another just now about enrollment.  Student enrollment reports are popular.  We often are wading through questions like “which enrollment report?, period, daily, course..”.  Sometimes the district staff is not even able to answer that, so much detail required by state ed….not enough training on how to deal with the “data gathering and reporting requirements”.  Its becoming a full time job, literally for public school districts to have dedicated data officers or data experts or data reporting experts or Data warehouse Coordinators.

We, BOCES, have a concept of shared data coordinators that our districts can hire on a short term or shared basis.  This model has worked for awhile, but it looks like districts are having to look again at staffing their own people.  A lot of our districts are rural, dont have the $ for a new position, so they purchase our service.  Is this the tail wagging the dog?  I notice the only context we talk about teaching now is in prepping for assessments and APPR – that’s the part where the teachers status is measured in part by the performance of students on assessments.  Oye.  How are our teachers doing?  Are they motivated?  Don’t worry public, they are held *accountable by standards assessments.   I am digressing again, sorry.

Data is moved from a local LEA to level 0 by using an extract.  The extract is a pattern that the data being uploaded to the level 0 must follow.  It is very specific and requires that data be in specific places and in expected format.  The extract file is *loaded in level 0 and then checked to ensure the extract files header and data are in conformance before being uploaded to the level 0 warehouse.

Once in level 0, the data is scrutinized by key staff members using applications that report and allow this type of activity.