April 2008 — Features
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On the Road to DDDM
Then there was the money angle. "We weight certain students in terms of the dollars given for those students based on their atrisk characteristics, the courses they take," explains Hirsch. "We said, 'What if we could bring in some of that financial piece?' All of a sudden, you can do a program cross, a salary cross. As we look at teachers, what's it costing us to get a student to move 10 RIT points?" (The RIT, or Rasch Unit, scale charts students' yearly academic growth.)
Although SAS' modularity offered a more flexible approach to analytics not provided by the other vendor candidates, Hirsch's team realized it would take longer to get the new software running. That was because the company lacked the models-descriptions of the programming logic that represented the analytics-for K-12 that it had in other segments, such as banking or financial services. The district would have to build those models itself.
Stage 6: Evaluate outcomes and modify as needed.
THE DISTRICT ASSESSES HOW EFFECTIVE ITS EFFORTS HAVE BEEN.
Hirsch has a pyschometrician-a testing expert-on staff, so he knew the district could handle defining the models. What it couldn't do was program them. For that, it relied on SAS professional services developers. Two SAS employees came in for about three weeks during the initial stage of the project, but everything after that was handled remotely.
In those early days, the pressure was on. The EdSoft application license had expired, so Hirsch's assessment group cranked out spreadsheets manually to deliver the data that teachers and principals needed.
The district spent 18 months getting the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform configured and developing the base models it would use for student assessment analysis. What the district didn't know was how well the software would scale to the number of users Hirsch expected to be accessing it: all 4,000 teachers and principals. During an initial workshop, attended by 90 people-primarily principals in the district-there was, says Hirsch, "a magnificent crash" within five seconds of going live. He blames the setup of the Apache-based database server that was managing the requests to the data, which collapsed under the weight of so many simultaneous appeals.
Hirsch says SAS wasn't accustomed to installations where more than several dozen people had access to the analysis tools. "The difference was, we're having all 4,000 of our teachers access the real SAS tools-not reports, but live, derived-frommodels results....SAS had never scaled a customer to this size."
At that point, Plano decided to take more ownership of the project. Hirsch assigned a network engineer on his staff to develop a more scalable application, while transition architecture was put in place, allowing users to use the system, "but not to the degree we wanted," he says.
