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Image from the DOE's Parent Link Web site

First it was principals, then it was teachers, and now parents are next in line to gain access to ARIS, the Department of Education’s data warehouse.

Each school will give parents passwords to log into the Parent Link section of ARIS sometime “between now and the end of the school year,” according to DOE spokesman Andy Jacob. Once logged in, parents will be able to monitor their child’s test scores.

The department is planning to hold a press conference tomorrow to debut Parent Link, ARIS’s previously missing puzzle piece, Jacob said. But the site is already up and running, and it appears that at least one school has given parents their usernames and temporary passwords: A commenter on Insideschools reports having received a password to access Parent Link — and finding that some of the information there was incorrect. (more…)

Yesterday, Elizabeth noted that the networking component of the Department of Education’s new data system is up and running. I got a taste of the program, “ARIS Connect,” in action last week at Channel 13′s Celebration of Teaching and Learning last Friday.

As some of GothamSchools’ commenters have noted, ARIS Connect is still very new and not yet widely used. But at least a couple of teachers and administrators already have tested its waters. I saw this myself at last week’s event when a DOE representative, Kerry O’Brien, gave me a demonstration of ARIS that included a look into how educators are using the system to network with each other.

One user had posted a question in a forum about assigning homework on weekends. Four or five teachers, from neighborhoods as far afield as Hunts Point in the Bronx and the Corona section of Queens, offered responses with varying perspectives and explanations. One called the weekend “the best time” for homework because assignments can be more in depth. Another said she doesn’t assign homework on the weekend at all. At the end of the thread, the teacher who originally asked the question weighed in again, thanking her colleagues for their feedback.

The exchange is precisely what ARIS Connect is meant to do, O’Brien told me. ”The department is empowering educators to share their expertise,” she said.

One thing ARIS cannot do, according to O’Brien: Allow multiple teachers to leave notes to each other about individual students. She said DOE officials believe the ramifications of having every comment become part of a student’s permanent DOE file so far outweigh the potential instructional benefits of such a feature.

In this week’s memo to principals, Chancellor Joel Klein offers some tips about the best ways to use the reams of student data the Department of Education is providing. One suggestion that seems slightly out of character (or at least out of caricature): Don’t gather too much data!

The motivating idea seems to be to save both paper and time by replacing binders stuffed with spreadsheets with online reports generated by ARIS, the computer data system that the city relaunched this year.

Here’s Klein’s own words, part of a list that he says the teachers union helped create:

2.    Evaluate the information you gather and reduce redundancy in reporting. Consider whether information on student and school performance that is now being made available to your school through ARIS, your Progress Report, Quality Review, Learning Environment Survey, Inquiry Team Tool (ITT), and your Periodic Assessment reports makes it unnecessary for your school to continue gathering information in other, more time-consuming and less effective ways.

In particular, consider whether it is effective to print out and assemble binders of assessment results. In many cases, assessment information is available in ARIS or in other places on the Internet, and can be more easily accessed and analyzed in an online format. And, as you know, you need not create any binders or other documents for the sole purpose of preparing for the Quality Review. Quality Reviewers focus only on data and reports that schools actually use in the regular course of the day and the school year. For example, you can show reviewers how you use the “student groups” function in ARIS to track the progress of groups of your students throughout the year.

The full memo: (more…)

Flanked by people who often find themselves arguing — Mayor Bloomberg, Chancellor Joel Klein, and teachers union leader Randi Weingarten — U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today offered praise for them all.

At a press conference this afternoon in Brooklyn, Duncan said all three New Yorkers have helped make the city an example for how school districts across the country could “remake public education” with their share of $100 billion in federal stimulus funds.

Some of the stimulus money is meant to plug deep holes in states’ education budgets. But Duncan said he wants states to use other funds allocated in the stimulus package to adopt accountability-oriented reforms along the lines of some recent New York City initiatives, such as the creation of a comprehensive data system, called ARIS, and the introduction of a program that gives some teachers bonuses based on their students’ test scores. The city Department of Education said in a press release today that it might try to use some of its stimulus money to expand those initiatives.

Those programs could be funded through Duncan’s discretionary “Race to the Top Fund,” through which the education secretary will give grants to states that want to try new approaches to helping students do better. “I fully expect New York City and New York State to put together a great proposal” for the funds, Duncan said. “In many ways, you are already setting the standard — including the pay-for-performance program here pioneered by the leadership right here in this city.”

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan with students, parents, and teachers from Brooklyn's Explore Charter School

Duncan departed from his prepared remarks to compliment Bloomberg’s “extraordinary courage” in taking control of the city’s schools and to say that he has learned a lot from Klein, whom he called “a good, good friend of mine.” Duncan also called Weingarten “a remarkable leader” and said he and President Barack Obama will work closely with her. “She is going to be a strong, strong voice for reform,” Duncan said. Video of the lovefest is above.

Even if they don’t see a cent of the Race to the Top Fund, New York City’s public schools and colleges are slated to receive about $1.9 billion through the federal stimulus act signed into law this week, Duncan said today. That money would prevent teacher layoffs, fill in some budget gaps, add new funds for poor students and children with special needs, and support preschool, technology, and job training programs.

The city DOE’s full press release is after the jump.

(more…)

Mayor Bloomberg's address, scheduled to begin at 1pm, is being broadcast online.

Mayor Bloomberg will give his annual “State of the City” address this afternoon. On the subject of education — you better sit down before reading this — Bloomberg is announcing his intention to lobby the legislature to preserve mayoral control of the public schools, according to a press release preview City Hall just sent out. Bloomberg’s other education-related announcements are two parent-outreach initiatives that seem designed to target one of the biggest concerns about mayoral control: that it’s left parents out of the schools.

One new program, called “Parent Connect,” will expand 311 services for parents, so that they can find information about admissions and transportation by calling the free city hotline. The other program is the fact that parents are going to have access to ARIS data some time this year (something we already knew from school officials).

You can watch the speech on NY1 or online here.

In my last post I raised the possibility that, if ARIS data is flawed, the city records that ARIS is built on could also be flawed. A reader just e-mailed in this response:

Agreed that this could be a big concern – but wouldn’t it be great to get out there that having the data easily accessible to teachers – which has not been the case — is an opportunity for schools to fix that and give teachers the accurate data that they need to provide students with effective instruction?   Not on the scale of sweeping social change, but a huge step toward school improvement, no?  What’s the alternative – we give up on data entirely?  Start over, but without the historical data for kids already in the system?

The ARIS logo.

The support organization New Visions for Public Schools is backing away from warnings it made last week about a new Department of Education data warehouse. The group had told principals not to rely on the accuracy of the data in the system, which is called ARIS. But in an e-mail sent to principals today, New Visions said that it had “overstated” those concerns:

We previously sent out our weekly eblast with language which overstated issues of data accuracy in the ARIS system. We continue to support school’s use of this powerful resource for using data to analyze and improve student achievement.  Our discussions with the ARIS team have confirmed that all of the system issues of which we were aware have been addressed.

The reversal shifts the picture about what exactly is going on with ARIS, an ambitious project that aims to collect databases on students that had been dispersed and hard to access into a single accessible online location. (more…)

Excerpt from a memo to principals from New Visions for Public Schools.

One of the city’s 11 school support organizations is warning principals not to trust information they find in the $80 million data warehouse the Department of Education re-launched this year.

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein promised that the system, called ARIS, would revolutionize the way teachers and principals do their jobs, by giving them a one-stop source of information on everything from a student’s attendance record to his test score history.

But a newsletter sent to principals last week by New Visions for Public Schools, an outside contractor that works with 75 city schools, describes ARIS as inaccurate. “Please do not rely on the accuracy of the data in ARIS,” it says. (Read the full newsletter, a Word document, here.) The warning follows a cacophony of problems that met ARIS’s first launch last school year.

A Department of Education spokesman, Andrew Jacob, said the memo is right to say that some data are still missing from ARIS, but wrong to challenge the available data’s accuracy. (more…)

Middle school English teacher Ms. Malarkey shares her real-life experience with the city’s data management tools:

I’ve been a good little soldier and have been attempting to use more data. Of course, it took me about three weeks to be able to log on to Acuity. No one could figure out why, but then I realized that my old DOE e-mail account is somehow lost in cyberspace, replaced with a newer one I had no idea about with both my maiden and married names. In the meantime, I still haven’t been able to log on to ARIS.

If a Department of Education program launches but isn’t press-released, has it really launched? ARIS, the online data warehouse that was re-launched to principals a few weeks ago after a very rough start last year, was re-launched to reporters this morning.

(Teachers are next in line to be informed: They are getting postcards (PDF) from the Department of Education this week letting them know the new ARIS has arrived.)

A few thoughts:

• ARIS is actually two different programs, each housed in the single Web site. The first is the data warehouse. The second is a kind of Facebook for the Department of Education.

  The data warehouse part is meant to streamline reports about city public school students that are now spread across at least seven locations, including some databases created 20 years ago. Teachers at the press event today said they used to spend hours searching for basic information, like what schools their students attended previously, who their English teacher was last year, how they scored on a math test, or how many high school credits a high school student had won. ARIS collects all of that intelligence in a single location that teachers and principals can access just by going on the Internet.

  Here’s what a high school teacher would see, looking at one of his classes (more…)