NCLB Scoring update

On September 28, 2009 we informed you here and here that there appeared to be problems in the new No Child Left Behind scores for 2009.

Official confirmation of the dimensions of the problem were provided during the Kentucky Board of Education meeting on October 8, 2009.

I learned a little more during yesterday’s Education Assessment and Accountability Review Subcommittee meeting. About 120 schools appear to have questionable data concerning students with learning disabilities and the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) sent messages to all of those schools requesting a review of the statistics currently in the department’s databases, including the data used for NCLB scoring.





The question of exactly what happened remains unanswered. The problems seem to be entirely random at this point, unrelated to such things as when each school changed over to the Infinite Campus student tracking computer system.

That random problem situation could indicate issues for the stability of Infinite Campus.

Back in May, we reported on an issue impacting the Henry County School District where they were getting unstable answers every time they tried to retrieve their Average Daily Attendance (ADA) figure from Infinite Campus.

Those ADA numbers are critical because they are used with several formulas to determine the amount of state and federal money each school district receives each year. I estimated the errors could lead to this small district getting inaccurate payments of as much as half a million dollars.

Anyway, it looks like the KDE data hounds are on the issue and asking the right kinds of questions. It will be interesting to see how their hunt turns out.