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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…)