Taming the data beast.

Taming the data beast. THE NO CHILD LEFT Behind act The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (Public Law 107-110), commonly known as NCLB (IPA: /ˈnɪkəlbiː/), is a United States federal law that was passed in the House of Representatives on May 23, 2001 has forced school districts to collecta mind-boggling amount and variety of data, which is overwhelmingadministrators already compiling com��pile?tr.v. com��piled, com��pil��ing, com��piles1. To gather into a single book.2. To put together or compose from materials gathered from several sources: other internal statistics formanagement purposes. The McKinney (Texas) Independent Schools, located30 miles north of Dallas, decided to take stock of its disparaterepositories of data: teachers' desktops, school office computers,and the central student information system. To obtain a comprehensiveview of a student's performance, staffers had to create aspreadsheet by manually inputting information from paper printouts takenfrom the different networks and computers. "It was taking too many man-hours to compile To translate a program written in a high-level programming language into machine language. See compiler. and then inputall of that information," recalls Joe Miniscalco, McKinney'ssenior director of secondary education and administrative services."Principals and teachers were wasting their time on thesespreadsheets, and there were too many hands on the data, inputtingnumbers here and there. We needed our data to be in one place." The solution was a data warehouse designed by New York-basedeScholar. This data management system stores all of the schooldistrict's data in one place so administrators can easily andefficiently organize it. eScholar and district officials put the datawarehouse in place in record time--30 days after the school board gaveits approval--joining the growing number of districts adopting suchsystems in the past decade. A Smooth Transition To help manage the system, the district hired a databaseadministrator to make sure all of the student assessment information andother data was entered and maintained correctly. District officialsestablished rules for using the data and created a "datadictionary A database about data and databases. It holds the name, type, range of values, source, and authorization for access for each data element in the organization's files and databases. " for all district staff. Showing Improvements Miniscalco believes the data warehouse has contributed to academicachievement. McKinney ISD See IDD. has used data analysis to drive changes toinstruction, improve teacher performance, and create more personalized per��son��al��ize?tr.v. per��son��al��ized, per��son��al��iz��ing, per��son��al��iz��es1. To take (a general remark or characterization) in a personal manner.2. To attribute human or personal qualities to; personify. instruction for students. Carol Winters, the department chair and teamleader for language arts language artspl.n.The subjects, including reading, spelling, and composition, aimed at developing reading and writing skills, usually taught in elementary and secondary school. at Scott Johnson Scott Johnson may refer to: Scott Johnson (composer), American composer Scott Johnson (actor), Australian actor Scott Johnson (percussionist), instructor for the Blue Devils Drum and Bugle Corps Scott W. Middle School, says teachersnow know how to analyze and interpret data down to individual studentsand their skills. "That's the real benefit of the datawarehouse," says Walters. "It's being able to access theinformation and then to use it to improve students' weakareas." Now the district is taking its use of data to the next level,having signed up with SchoolNet in February to establish a Web-basedwarehouse for curricula, lesson plans and other information forteachers. SchoolNet will partner with eScholar to be sure both systemswork together. When the school year begins in August, teachers will beable to access materials and academic content from home as well as fromschool. The district is also working on providing parents and students withonline access to grades and updated district information. The datawarehouse is at the root of all of these changes. "It's reallyparamount to our success," Miniscalco says. "In order to get adeep look at how we're performing, we need that data warehouse.It's how we do business now." McKinney (Texas) Independent School District No. of teachers: 1,459 No. of students: 21,132 Per-pupil expenditure: $6,671 (2005-2006) Free and reduced-price lunch: 25% (2006-2007) Dropout (1) On magnetic media, a bit that has lost its strength due to a surface defect or recording malfunction. If the bit is in an audio or video file, it might be detected by the error correction circuitry and either corrected or not, but if not, it is often not noticed by the human rate: .003% for 2005-2006 year City population: 115,000 Superintendent: Thomas J. Crowe Web site: www.mckinneyisd.net Lucille Renwick is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles Los Angeles(lôs ăn`jələs, lŏs, ăn`jəlēz'), city (1990 pop. 3,485,398), seat of Los Angeles co., S Calif.; inc. 1850. .