Infinite Questions

We’ve been covering the teething problems with the Kentucky Department of Education’s new computer support program for schools (see here, here, here and here) for some time.

The first version, known as STI, failed some time ago.

The replacement, known as Infinite Campus, has just now become operational in all school districts – more or less. But, the start-up issues are far from over, as hearings before the Kentucky Board of Education today made clear.

One of the potentially good features of Infinite Campus is a parent portal which allows parents to check, daily if they want, on things like their child’s actual presence in class and grades. However, discussions in today’s meeting of the Kentucky Board of Education indicate a number of districts have yet to implement this feature, due in part to security concerns that the wrong parent might be coded against the wrong student.

One of the not good features of Infinite Campus is the vast increase in data entry requirements. During the board meeting, one member asked if adopting this new technology had improved efficiency and reduced labor needs. The presenter admitted that the opposite was happening, as districts were having to add staff to feed the voracious appetite of this data monster (which, among other things, collects a fair amount of information about whole families, not just the individual student).

One last observation came from a demonstration to the board of the features of Infinite Campus. The presenter had lots of problems logging in, first as a teacher, and in several other cases including as a state level administrator. We all know that computers can be cranky, but with at least three log-on “crumps,” I wonder if districts are having similar problems.

So, if you work with this system, let us know about problems you are having. We’ll fully understand if you log on anonymously so you don’t feel threatened.

Oh, one more point. The board heard that the annual costs for the state to operate Infinite Campus runs about $5.5 million, and that does not seem to include any district or school level support costs like those extra programmers. But, Infinite Campus isn’t ready to support longitudinal data tracking, which is needed under the new SB-1, so up that cost by another $1 million at least.

“Infinite Campus” equals Infinite Heartache?

The latest slam on the Kentucky Department of Education’s (KDE) student tracking program called “Infinite Campus” was leveled in the Kentucky New Era on July 19.

Apparently, the user unfriendly computer program made for some long delays during student registration at Christian County High School.

Infinite Campus isn’t fully up and running in all school districts, but it certainly has had growing pains during the pilot stage.

The KDE says the student tracking program is to be up in all schools by the end of 2008. Given the number of complaints to date, that isn’t looking like much of a Christmas present for those schools that have yet to tangle with this tangle.
I last wrote about Infinite Campus’ woes only a few days ago in an article about new California dropout rates from that state’s new and much more accurate student tracking system. Infinite Campus is supposed to serve a similar function here. But, if students take hours just to get registered in the new system, it is highly likely that the data it produces won’t be worth much for a long time. Of course, given that we expect Kentucky will have to own up to much lower graduation rates and much higher dropout rates once Infinite Campus is working, maybe the confusion and delay was someone’s idea from the start.

Perhaps it’s time to call California to find out how they can do this job – now – with hundreds of thousand more kids, better than we can.

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.

Read more »

Is Kentucky’s On-Line Public School Student Data Going to Be Safe?

The Dallas Morning News reports that personal student data and test scores in Florida and Virginia were accidentally disclosed recently by a computer-based testing company. Texas also has a contract with the firm and is now anxiously checking to see if their student data will receive better protection.

Does this matter to us in Kentucky? You Bet!

I don’t think that Kentucky has any contracts with the firm that messed up in Florida and Virginia, but that does not mean we have no worries.

In early August, two separate legislative committees heard reports on a pair of massive education databases that are being assembled by the Kentucky Department of Education. The first of these, known as “Infinite Campus,” will make all sorts of student data available on line. Teachers will be able to access and update electronic grade books from home (or anywhere else), and parents will be able to see those grades and information about their child’s attendance, as well. Infinite Campus is also supposed to integrate with the folks who run Kentucky’s KEES Scholarship program, facilitating rapid transfers of ACT scores and high school grades to speed up the process of awarding these state-funded scholarships.

A second database effort sounds even more far-reaching. Called the Kentucky Instructional Data System (KIDS), this data management octopus will reach into many other computers located in various state agencies that nominally have little direct contact with education. Areas that may get linked include medical files and student drivers' licenses (to insure students who are failing don’t get/keep them).

Proponents of these systems, which include many state leaders from the governor on down, paint glowing pictures of how these systems will help improve the information available to policy makers and ultimately improve state efficiency. They make a convincing argument, one the Bluegrass Institute might ordinarily be happy to bandwagon.

But, on this monster effort, we see the chance for serious troubles ahead. There are shades of George Orwell’s “1984” all over this. Here are some quick thoughts:

1) The education department will be storing student social security numbers along side their own student identification numbers because the KEES Scholarship database can’t use the student numbers. There may also be plans to store a lot of sensitive data about parents – possibly including their social security numbers and income information – to determine eligibility for free and reduced cost lunches.

In this day and age of identity theft, any database that stores social security information is ripe for criminal hacking. When income information, home addresses, and telephone numbers are also available, the chance of identity theft undoubtedly becomes far worse.

2) How much student and parent data does the department of education really need? When is the amount of data kept in the hands of just a few too much information? Who decides? What are the qualifications of those who decide who gets access to what?

3) With such a hugely valuable database in hand – one that contains a tremendous amount of information about each child (information about learning disabilities, behavior, and maybe even a picture as well as age, sex, phone number and address), and which may allow access to other databases that contain an even more enormous amount of information about all of us – are there any requirements for those who have broad access to pass criminal background checks? Were any criminal background checks run on the computer programmers and the contractors who are assembling Infinite Campus and KIDS? Certainly, access to this data would be a child molester’s dream.

After all, if a parent wants to help out at school, they have to pass an investigation. Do we have lower requirements for the people controlling information that could be very valuable to the criminal element?

In any event, we are hearing lots of promises from our state leaders about security for this information. I’ll bet folks in Florida and Virginia heard the same – before their data compromise happened.

But, the mistake happened, anyway.

And, last year, a school finance person was able to manipulate the Kentucky Department of Education’s MUNIS financial accounting system in an attempt to hide illegal payments, as well. If the department can’t protect money, how confident can we be that they will successfully protect your child’s social security number – or yours?

Infinite Campus Student Software Security Issue?

– Student changes grades in a school’s computers

The Courier-Journal is reporting on a student who is being denied access to her graduation ceremony after she conspired with another student to change grades in the Jeffersonville High School’s computer system.

While this incident apparently took place up in Indiana, it provides another case in point that some students will work very hard to compromise computer systems – especially those that have things like their grades in them – and there is a history of students sometimes succeeding.

We need to insure that Kentucky’s new Infinite Campus computer system, which now tracks student grades here, is more robust than the system used in Clark County, Indiana. Infinite Campus holds a lot more sensitive information besides just student grades, and a compromise could have serious consequences for parents as well as their student children.

(Corrects earlier version of this post which assumed the high school in question was in Kentucky as the Courier article did not identify the state where the school is located)

Infinite Campus Heartburn Continues

– State’s student tracking software has major problem

Infinite Campus is the new student tracking software program that the Kentucky Department of Education just brought on line.

– Well, sort of.

It turns out the software is fouling up the calculation of absolutely critical average daily attendance figures for every school district in Kentucky.

Those figures are essential because a significant amount of the money that each district gets from the state is determined from them.

Henry County Schools superintendent Tim Abrams indicated to his board that they need to get this fixed by May 30th to stay on track for submitting next year’s budget.

Right now, just in Henry County they get numbers anywhere from 1920 to 2000 when they run the average daily attendance calculation. That 80 student difference might not sound like a lot until you realize this is just for one district, and with current state revenue for Henry County running $5,440 per pupil, the difference could change what this small district gets by nearly half a million dollars next year.

Chalk another one up for “Infinite Heartburn.”

More Infinite Heartaches

– Kentucky’s statewide student data system continues to cause problems

I’ve mentioned the problems before, and now the Kentucky Department of Education’s (KDE) Infinite Campus student tracking system continues to have severe teething pains, this time in Boyd County.

This multi-million dollar effort was supposed to make it easier for parents to access their children’s grades and other information. So far, at least in Boyd County, the opposite has happened.

Also, beware KDE spokeswoman Lisa Gross’ comment in the news article that the costs of Infinite Campus are lower than the older program, which never worked right, either. In the Kentucky Board of Education meeting last week it was admitted that there is a higher workload to manage this data-hungry digital monster. Districts are having to hire extra data programmers to cope. Those extra costs might not appear in the KDE’s budget, as the districts have to come up with the money, but the taxpayer ultimately will get a larger bill, maybe with increased local taxes.

Honest High School Dropout Reporting in California Brings Huge Rate Increase

California recently started a high quality student tracking system, and the first results just came out. The state now admits that one out of four kids didn’t make it through high school.

The new dropout rate for California is listed as 24.2-percent. Last year, using a calculation the Los Angeles Times now labels “discredited,” Californians were told only 13.9-percent of the students were lost during the high school years.

Here in Kentucky, we are still waiting for our troubled student tracking system to even start. The first attempt, the STI system, has been cancelled, and the replacement, called “Infinite Campus,” is generating lots of complaints from the pilot school districts. Never the less, the Kentucky Department of Education says they are going state-wide with Infinite Campus anyway by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, Kentucky remains where California was, using officially “discredited” data from our CATS nonacademic reports that do nothing beyond inflating CATS school assessments and No Child Left Behind results.

Honest high school graduation rates will be lower

Kentucky Department of Education agrees with us

Recent information from the Kentucky Department of Education supports my concerns that the recently reported high school graduation rate in Kentucky is much too high.

How much too high?

Maybe as much as 10 points.

If so, Kentucky’s true high school graduation rate in 2009 could be only around 74 percent, not the recently reported rate of 83.91 percent.

Read more »

Kentucky NCLB scoring errors did impact schools – Story grows

Another local newspaper reports that a school has gotten its NCLB scoring changed due to errors in the initial 2009 report. Adding information to my earlier post, the Manchester Enterprise (subscription) reports that the Paces Creek Elementary School has had its NCLB criteria upgraded to meeting all goals.

The Enterprise says Paces Creek Principal David Murray claims a glitch in the Infinite Campus student tracking program was at fault.

If so, this is a serious problem that raises more questions about the Infinite Campus program, an absolutely critical element in the Kentucky Department of Education’s plans to improve student tracking and reporting.

Tracking Students Is One Thing – But Tracking Your Entire Household?

What is the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) really tracking? We have written before such as here and here about the teething problems with the KDE’s new student tracking system – at least we thought it was a STUDENT tracking system.

Now, a news report hints that the KDE’s new “Infinite Campus” computer database system may be something more – a household tracking system!

Why is the department of education setting up a system that tracks students not as individuals, but only as members of households? Does the department of education have legitimate reasons to track anything organized by households?

Certainly, the Times Tribune article raises lots more questions than answers about a computerized tracking system so involved that some educators say it’s “scary” just to implement the thing. Could there be even more to be scared of than anyone in the public knows?

What happens when states get more honest graduation rate reports?

We’ve discussed inaccurate graduation rate reporting in Kentucky many times such as here and here.

According to the latest Kentucky Department of Education nonacademic report, covering the Class of 2008, Kentucky supposedly graduated 84.52 percent of its high school students. Keep that figure in mind.

Well, the fact is that the formula used to fabricate that number was officially audited in 2006 and found unreliable. The real graduation rate in Kentucky is much lower.

How much lower?

We really won’t know for sure until the department gets its troubled Infinite Campus student tracking system up and on line for four years, perhaps around 2013 or so.

But the state of Oregon just got more honest with its citizens, and here is what the Oregonian says happened. The newspaper says that once more accurate reporting was conducted, “…only 68 percent of the class graduated within four years -- starkly lower than the 84 percent graduation rate the state reported for the same class just two months ago, based on its previous, looser definition.”

Hmmm – 84 percent – why does that number sound familiar?

So, what happened in Oregon might be the kind of number change that will happen here once honesty finally overcomes an unfortunate tendency in our education circles to fool us with figures.

Knox County – Corbin Independent Schools deal just got MUCH bigger

We’ve been covering the loss of parental choice options because of the Knox County Public Schools’ recent cancellation of their long-standing student transfer agreement with the Corbin Independent School District since January.

Initially, it looked like around 160 or so kids would be forced to return to Knox County schools, but a new announcement says that number is in serious error.

The problem is that the Infinite Campus student tracking computer system (which we have raised concerns about before such as here, here and here) had many address errors.

Now, it looks like over 400 students are impacted, which could cause serious repercussions for the Corbin Independent School District if it looses that many students.

According to enrollment data from the Kentucky Department Of Education’s Growth Factor Report, Ethnic Membership By District And Grade, for School Year 2009-2010, the entire enrollment in Corbin Independent was only 2,681 students for that recent school term. If this small district suddenly looses over 400 students, the sudden enrollment drop of 15 percent could be devastating.

If those kids were being forced into a better school system, this might be justified, but as we have pointed out before, when it comes to graduation rates, middle school EXPLORE and high school ACT test scores, No Child Left Behind performance, and increasing performance and participation on the Advanced Placement tests, the facts are that Corbin Independent provides a much better education than Knox County does.

Given the sudden surprise about how many kids are impacted, look for this battle to get even more heated as Knox County’s lust for power faces off against what is best for (a lot more) students.

US Dept. of Education’s ‘take’ on Kentucky’s high school graduation rates

As First Lady Jane Beshear gets ready to kick off her forum on Kentucky’s endemic problems with high school graduation rates, I thought everyone might benefit from seeing Kentucky’s numbers using a well-researched high school graduation rate formula created several years ago by the US Department of Education.

This formula is known as the Averaged Freshman Graduation Rate, or AFGR. It was extensively researched along with a number of other formulas by national dropout and graduation rate statisticians after passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 focused new attention on the nationwide problem of high school dropouts.

That federally sponsored research showed the AFGR returned the most accurate information when it was tested with two states where high quality student tracking systems provided really accurate comparison data (Note: Kentucky lags in this area and is at least four years away from getting the first high quality graduation rate information from its still teething “Infinite Campus” student data system).

This graph summarizes the AFGR for Kentucky as published in several different issues of the annually released “Digest of Education Statistics.”


Notice that Kentucky hit a peak in high school graduations in the 1993-94 school year, shortly after KERA was enacted. Most of those graduates spent the majority of their school years in classrooms that saw little, if any, impact from the reform, which focused in the early years on the lower grades.

Also note that as of the latest available data, Kentucky has yet to return to that peak performance in 1993-94. While there has been a notable improvement in graduation rates since the 2001-02 school year, we still have a long way to go. As of 2005-06, the US Department of Education’s most accurate high school graduation rate formula shows Kentucky still was losing nearly one in four students.

Looking at the graph, it isn’t hard to understand why Kentucky educators held off adopting the quality AFGR formula for Kentucky. Kentucky’s official graduation rate statistics are based on another formula that was also examined by the US Department of Education. That formula was found to return the most inflated figures of any formula the research team examined, sometimes running as much as 10 percentage points too high.

The Kentucky Department of Education’s “Briefing Packet” for 2008 nonacademic data shows the state’s 2006 high school graduation rate was 83.26 percent. Compare that to the 77.2 percent figure the US Department of Education calculated with the AFGR formula. The six-point difference amounts to around 3,000 more dropouts than our educators want to admit left Kentucky high schools without a diploma in 2006.

Kentucky’s current graduation rate formula was also audited by the Kentucky Auditor of Public Accounts and found to have significant errors.

Wouldn’t it be nice for our educators to move to the AFGR formula now? Maybe then we would get a better idea of exactly how bad our high school dropout situation really is. I hope Kentucky’s First Lady will join us in calling for that change when our next round of graduation rates is released next summer.

You can read more about graduation rates in general and AFGR’s in the FreedomKentucky Wiki.

You can access “Digest of Education Statistics” issues and individual tables here.

Bill to raise minimum dropout age advances, slowly

WAVE-3 reports that House Bill 301, which will raise the minimum high school dropout age in Kentucky, passed the Kentucky Senate Education Committee today, but not until it was amended to delay implementation of the higher age requirements by a year.

Now, the age won’t rise from 16 to 17 until 2015, and it won’t rise to the final 18-year-old point until a year afterwards.

While I am not sure that this bill is the right answer to the state’s dropout problem, I am very confident that the real number of dropouts is much higher than the “official” number of 6,500 which the WAVE-3 item mentions.

The state’s dropout reporting was officially audited in 2006 and found to seriously under-report the true number of dropouts.

Other, more credible calculations, which center on high school graduation rates, not dropouts, indicate Kentucky understates the true number of dropouts by somewhere around 60 to 100 percent.

Next year, the Kentucky Department of Education will drop its current, inaccurate dropout reporting and switch to a better graduation rate formula for school accountability. The data will get better still around 2013 when our new student tracking data system called Infinite Campus is supposed to be on line long enough to support really high grade reports.

NCLB Scoring Errors?

The new Kentucky No Child Left Behind (NCLB) scores for 2009 have been out less than a week, but at least two school districts are already questioning their reports.

The most recent situation was covered by the News-Graphic from Georgetown. Under the title, “Schools score 94.7 percent, fail No Child Left Behind” (Subscription), the newspaper includes comments that the Scott County Public School District found mistakes in the number of its learning disabled students in the new report.

Per Scott County, the NCLB report shows 188 more learning disabled students than are actually in the system. I calculate that figure would be more than 30 percent too high, based on the number of learning disabled students in the system one year earlier.

This error could point to a number of problems, but the leading suspect at this point is the Infinite Campus student tracking computer program. This is a program with teething pains, as we have noted before.

Scott County isn’t the only school district with concerns. The first school system to question the new NCLB results is the Barren County School District. According to the Glasgow Daily Times, the district’s director of Instruction and Techonology, Benny Lile, spotted some “discrepancies” which the paper didn’t discuss further.

I called Mr. Lile, who has a long history of service to state education as the past chair of the statewide School Curriculum, Assessment and Accountability Committee. He indicated the problem in Barren County also concerns questionable numbers of students who were reported as learning disabled.

It will be interesting to see if more districts have similar problems.

As an aside, I also talked to Mr. Lile about how Barren County is handling the new testing data. He is going to be doing a good job with that task. His district will take a detailed look at the data broken down by individual test and by student subgroup performance. I think that is exactly what the legislature intended when they disbanded the CATS accountability system with its overly simplistic single-score-for-everything approach, which just wound up hiding lots of problems.

Lile’s district isn’t going to do anything with the unofficial, CATS-like number called the “Transition Index” that a consortium of private groups concocted this year. Lile recognizes that single number can hide all sorts of underlying problems and mostly just serves to confuse the public about what is really going on in their public schools.

Legislators finally approve regulation to get honest about high school graduation rates

One important action taken in the May 14, 2010 meeting of the Kentucky Legislature’s Education Assessment and Accountability Review Subcommittee was the approval of a new edition of regulation Kentucky 703 KAR 5:060, “Interim Assessment and Accountability Process,” which governs the accountability program in the state.

Included in this revision are requirements for Kentucky to adopt reporting with a more accurate interim graduation rate formula, known as the “Averaged Freshman Graduation Rate,” beginning in 2011.

During discussions on the regulation, which only covers a short, interim period for the next few years, it was also announced, assuming the state stays on schedule with the implementation of its Infinite Campus student tracking program, that we will switch to an even higher accuracy graduation rate reporting process in 2013.

Most states are already reporting high-accuracy graduation rates using the approach we will have to wait until 2013 to see. Historically, as states get honest about this important statistic, they find out their old reporting programs seriously overstated the real graduation rates in their schools.

I expect the same shock about our public school system is about to hit us, starting next year.

Here is an example of the kinds of graduation rates we might see, based on using a tool found in the Alliance for Excellent Education’s web site. This tool allows you to quickly determine a graduation-rate-like figure for all the high schools in Kentucky.


It’s a real shame that we don’t have accurate graduation rate data now. If we did, more of you would understand why Kentucky’s failure to implement charters schools has let more kids drop through the education cracks.

Charters, you see, like this one, are starting to show dramatic results with kids who likely would never have finished high school had they remained trapped in the traditional public school system. But, our teachers’ union doesn’t seem to want any Kentucky kids to benefit from this sort of effective help to graduate.

House Bill 176 – Only half right

One provision in HB 176 is causing a huge amount of turmoil – it’s the standard that says a high school isn’t considered a “Persistently Low-Achieving School” if its graduation rate exceeds a ridiculously low standard of just 60 percent.

Proponents of the bill correctly point out that the number "60" is actually contained in the US Department of Education’s final rules for the Race to the Top fund. But, they are not paying attention to the full description of this provision.

The final Race to the Top (RTTT) rules say in several places such as on pages 59766 and 59767 in the November 18, 2009 Federal Register that a “Persistently Lowest-Achieving School,”

“Is a high school that has had a graduation rate as defined in 34 CFR 200.19(b) that is less than 60 percent over a number of years.”

That reference to 34 CFR 200.19(b) is what HB 176 proponents are conveniently ignoring. The referenced federal regulation defines what is now called the “Cohort Graduation Rate” formula. The 60% figure was intended to be used with that formula.

Now, here’s the rub. Kentucky cannot compute a graduation rate that complies with 34 CFR 200.19(b) until it has a high quality student tracking system in place for four years. As we have abundantly commented before, Kentucky’s Infinite Campus student tracking system is way behind the schedule anticipated by the federal government. We won’t be able to report the first Cohort Graduation Rate data that complies with 34 CFR 200.19(b) until 2014.

Thus, Kentucky cannot currently comply with the RTTT guidance on graduation rates.

What to do?

We do have a US Department of Education exemption from compliance with the Cohort rate for No Child Left Behind purposes until 2014. However, that means we have to use another graduation rate formula for our RTTT threshold. That formula is not harmonized with the 60 percent figure in the RTTT final guidance package.

So, I think those who say the 60 percent figure is a federal requirement that Kentucky can’t increase overlook the fact that we can’t comply with the full definition of that federal requirement in any event.

We need to choose something else in our RTTT package that will give comparable performance with our existing data. Otherwise, we will look like we are trying to game the system.

Considering the stakes, and the fierce competition, and the fact that we are already hobbled in RTTT if we don’t implement charter schools, we don’t need that extra baggage.

Somehow, I can’t believe that our RTTT application would be downgraded if we selected a more rigorous graduation rate threshold (something higher than 60 percent) to better correspond to our current formula’s results. Actually, I would think the US Department of Education judges would be impressed that we took care of this problem, and they might even award more points as a result.

On the other hand, if we keep the 60 percent rate while we use formulas that are less accurate, and more inflated, than the high quality Cohort Rate, we run the risk of losing everything.

Besides, who really wants to go on record saying that a 60 percent high school graduation rate is just fine? I sure don’t.