Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Tracking Individual Students

California is trying to implement a system that will allow the state to track individual students throughout the education system. So far it's had a few bugs:

Known as CalPADS, the new system will track a range of data for students, including what classes they take, their grades and test scores, whether they graduate or drop out, and demographic information such as race, parent education and home address.

State officials acknowledge the system is "slow," saying the multiple servers required for the millions of records in the system (California has more than 6 million public school students this year) are failing to move information from one place to another when one of them gets overloaded.

"It's going as well as can be expected," said Keric Ashley, director of the data management division for the California Department of Education. He said everything should be straightened out this week.


I wonder what this information will tell us about the real dropout rate in the state.

6 comments:

  1. That's pathetic. 6 million public school students - that's it? And the system is slow?

    Must have used access databases on a windows box running win2000.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ah yes... part of my job is working with information that gets uploaded to CalPADS. Fun times...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Erica6:50 PM

    How is this not exactly like a college transcript?

    ReplyDelete
  4. The state will track students, even if they move to another school or district. Each student will have a unique numerical identifier.

    ReplyDelete
  5. What is the state using for computers, old Tandy 286's or some antique Atari system..... :-)

    ReplyDelete
  6. Oh Lord, they are doing that to us too. It's an attempt to place blame for drop outs and to find out where the transient students go when they are here one day and gone then next. Every layer of software they put on my computer makes teaching a subject that more difficult.

    ReplyDelete