The following is a guest post by Mike Oboryshko. Mike is a Red Clay parent and a friend of mine and of this blog.
Last Friday, a pair of RFPs were awarded to develop some major new technologies for Delaware schools, as part of Delaware’s Education Insight Project. This project was outlined in Delaware’s Race To The Top application, and with these RFPs, the design and implementation is under way.
The goal is to “transform Delaware’s schools from ‘data rich’ to ‘data driven’ and to implement a flagship Race to the Top program.” Like most new technologies, this new system will change the way educators, students, and parents do business, most likely for the better.
“This isn’t just another grant, but whole system reform”
– Dr. Lillian Lowery, DOE Secretary of Education
I confess I was not paying sufficient attention during the RTTT process, but the RFPs now have my full attention. My intent with this post is to walk through the RFPs and other public information, to highlight some important details, and to give a picture of what is going on with this new initiative. This is essentially an unauthorized biography with no inside information, so please feel free to correct me if you have data.
For this post I am not so much interested in who is awarded the RFP, or how much it costs (although Sungard seems to have a leg up). What interests me is the level of detail provided by these RFPs, providing some unusual transparency into the planning for the next-generation technology. This new system will largely determine how we all interact with the schools of Delaware’s future: students, parents, teachers, and administrators.
The new tools will open new possibilities, but will also impose new constraints, depending on how they are designed. And the design is beginning right now.
In Part 2, I will explain what is known about the design of the “Dashboards,” which are the actual applications that teachers and administrators will be using. We’ll discuss the underlying educational metrics, and the workshop that will be used to define them. Plus, I will answer the question: What does Texas have to do with all of this?
In Part 3, I will discuss the upcoming training sessions on the new technology for teachers and administrators (sooner than you think), and how any of this may or may not benefit parents, students, or teachers.
Like most parents, my involvement in the schools began with an interest in a particular issue that affected my family. In my case, the issue was parent-teacher communication. I began investigating the Home Access Center, which I felt could be used to better advantage for communication and parent involvement. There wasn’t much information available about it, so I began figuratively peering in windows and pulling at loose threads to figure out what modern communication capabilities were already available in the schools, and what was preventing the schools from using them to their best advantage. But that is a post for another day. In the end, my investigation led me to the Education Insight Project.
So on to the RFPs. DOE has posted the RFPs here at the time of this writing, but they may scroll off in the future. Not to worry, I have saved copies and will post them if necessary.
The Data Warehouse RFP
Education Insight Project, Longitudinal Data Warehouse, RFP # 2011-10
A data warehouse is simply a database that gathers data from multiple sources and makes it easy and fast for developers to build new programs to access it. The Data Warehouse RFP is for the design of a data warehouse for all Delaware school and student data. Most of Delaware student data is already kept in a common database (Sungard eSchoolMaster). Other data sources are also used, and are defined in the RFP.
The new data warehouse will keep the current databases in place, but will synch all the data and unify it in a single place where it can be accessed more easily, and is optimized for faster performance. This will allow developers flexibility to build new tools very quickly as needed (most likely web-based). Tools that were not practical to build before will suddenly become easy.
None of this data warehouse will be visible to most users. The way you will know it is there is when you start to see new web-based applications (“dashboards”) for using this data, in ways you probably never knew were possible. Teachers and administrators will be able to slice and dice data about individual students, or groups of students, or even their own accountability measurements.
The data warehouse will pull in school profile data, and licensure and other employment-related data for teachers, so the dashboards will potentially unify teacher and student data to provide very useful and detailed views of accountability data.
The Dashboard RFP
Education Insight Project, Insight Dashboard Analysis & Design, RFP # 2011-12
Dashboards are like the apps for your smartphone. They will be web sites that allow teachers, administrators, (and hopefully parents and students) to view and manipulate data in the warehouse. The first dashboard will be aimed at teachers, and training will begin this summer with a small group of teachers and administrators:
Over time, additional applications will be brought under the portal…
The first priority for the Portal will be the Teacher’s Insight Dashboard. The Teacher’s
Insight dashboard will filter out the noise inherent in the large volume of data available
about students in the classroom, allowing them to focus on things of greatest importance.Dashboard RFP, Section 2.2
The technology revolution is coming to Delaware. So if you are a teacher or principal who has been a little uncomfortable with using web-based tools, it seems pretty clear these new tools will quickly become the center of your information world. I’d suggest volunteering for the training and getting with the new system at the earliest opportunity.
The Dashboard RFP is a little bit disorienting, because it doesn’t lay out traditional deliverables well specified in advance. Instead, the state basically knows where it wants to go, but is seeking a technical partner to help with the requirements and design work, and very likely remain with the project through development and implementation. Once the design is complete, the state reserves the right to do some or all of the development work itself. All in all, it seems like a smart use of an external vendor to supplement DDOE in-house capabilities:
This RFP is for the analysis and design of dashboards only…. When dashboard design is complete, the State will decide either to issue an RFP for dashboard development or to complete the development using DDOE staff.
… the Vendor will engage Delaware stakeholders in a collaborative analysis process to identify Delaware requirements…
Dashboard RFP, Section 1.1
I’ll have more on dashboards in Part 2.