January 2004 — Features
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New IDEAS: Putting the School Interoperability Framework to the Test
The Jurupa Unified School District in Southern California recently partnered with Microsoft, Dell and the Zone Integration Group for the implementation of a School Interoperability Framework (SIF) database repository model throughout the district (Magner 2002). A two-week project — the Integrated District Education Applications System, better known as New IDEAS — targeted the effective adoption of an integrated IT platform that would enable the district to automate routine tasks, integrate data across the district's core applications and drive process improvements. Budget constraints, coupled with increasing demands from local, state and federal requirements for data reporting, made it imperative that the district carefully maximize all investments in upgraded technologies. By optimizing processes in order to incorporate the ability to aggregate and share data across core systems, as well as by making this information readily available to all constituent groups throughout the district, technological and budgetary goals would be met.
Establishing a Data Repository
Implementing information technology to drive instruction is not a new concept to the Jurupa USD. In 1999, the district embarked on an aggressive project to create new curriculum standards and criterion-referenced tests for both formative and summative assessments, as well as to measure subsequent student performance. As the process evolved, test-item banks were developed for all grade levels. Statisticians and psychometricians provided staff development to the district assessment department to instill the rigor to establish the required instruments, ensuring validity of the test items. Following stabilization of the mechanics, the major decisions surrounding data collection, analysis and reporting were approached. The very basic, but pivotal, question of exactly how the district would use the disaggregated data to influence classroom instruction was also examined.
As soon as Jurupa USD had established an education technology department, the curriculum and instruction department turned to the newly appointed director of education technology to investigate available products to ascertain what would best fit the needs of the district. The answer was surprising and the need far greater than initially anticipated, so we knew a data warehouse must be developed. From that moment in 1999 forward, the development of a data repository that would interface with the multiple databases already existing throughout the school sites and district office became our ongoing central focus.
The process was slow for two primary reasons. First, the cost of this undertaking was excessive and very few school districts throughout the nation could be identified as good models in data mining. Second, the typical manual reporting structures and electronic spreadsheets of the past had not yet failed the district; they remained deeply embedded. However, now, as the importance of the data surpassed that of the technology, a paradigm shift occurred. The question became focused on what was needed to establish a data repository toward district accountability.
