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Problem: Public Schools Look for New Ways to Raise Student Achievement.
Background
It’s no secret that Public Education is under the spotlight. State mandated testing
coupled with new requirements in Federal "No Child Left Behind" legislation have
got school districts searching for more effective methods of educating our children.
It’s quite clear the old tools of education, experience, intuition, philosophy and
gut-feel are not enough to deal with the challenges of today. District
superintendents everywhere know the consequences for schools that can’t show
quantifiable improvement.
Intelligent-Information Solution
Fortunately, there are successes out there. Today, leading
school districts are becoming more like efficient businesses, using facts to
drive decisions and facts to assess the results. Our client, a large urban
school district has embarked upon this path and has engaged our assistance.
With a mandate to create a foundation to support data driven decision making at
all levels, VersiFit designed an Intelligent-Information Solution. The
solution foundation is a student data warehouse. This is a repository where all
of the important information about a student is stored. Like businesses,
schools capture and store lots of information. The problem is the data is
stored in many different school systems. The data warehouse solves that
problem. Interestingly enough, we located over 25,000 different pieces of
potentially useful information in these systems. However, after working with
teachers, principles and researchers, we found only 325 of these were useful. So,
one can think of the student data warehouse not as a place to store information,
but rather, as a place where it can be found! VersiFit has built data warehouses
for industry for years and now has transformed this important business tool to
the business of educating children.
Results
The student data warehouse has enabled our client to attain real progress in
its transformation into a data driven decision-making organization. Now, reports
that once took days to create, run in a matter of minutes. Researchers and
teachers can now easily look at the data in new and creative ways to try and
unlock better teaching methods. Information can now be transmitted in a highly
intuitive graphical format, electronically rather than on paper, saving everybody
time and money. Ultimately, the job of improving student test scores falls on
those in the front-line of education, the teachers, principals and administrators.
Certainly there are no illusions of instant success, changing the mindset of
K-12 education is a formidable task. However, now that a path has been blazed
and schools are starting to utilize the techniques and technologies proven in
business there is real hope for improvement.
For more information contact:
Mike Restle 920-882-1904 or
restlem@versifit.com
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