Databus Issue: 2004 4 10/01/2004
Addressing Problems of Information Exchange
By Russ Brawn Chief Operating OfficerCSIS as a ‘Data Utility’
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Knowing the Problem
For a moment, imagine yourself to be the chief executive officer of a large enterprise (on the scale, say, of a Fortune 500 company) having these characteristics:
• more than a half-million employees
• an annual budget exceeding $42 billion
• six million clients
and most challenging of all,
• an abundance of legislated,
somewhat conflicting, not to mention, ethically demanding directions as to how services are to be delivered to those clients.
What strategic management information might this CEO expect to have available? Would a one-year delay between deliveries of service and reporting of service provided be acceptable? When a client moved to a different branch office, would a six-week delay in records transfer be acceptable? The situation is not imaginary; rather it is an all too real representation of the information available to support education services to California’s publicly enrolled students.
The California School Information Services (CSIS) program was established to address these and like problems that exist with the management and exchange of student and staff information. Literally, the legislation authorizing CSIS proposes achieving the program’s goals through the “development and implementation of an electronic statewide school information system to address current problems of information exchange.” The concept of a comprehensive statewide initiative to collect, maintain and provide staff and student data for better decision making at all educational levels is hardly new. Several states beat California to ‘the punch’, starting to build some pieces even before California embarked on pilot work in the early 90s. And, though CSIS was authorized in 1997 and addressed in subsequent legislation1, complete implementation is not yet achieved. This is partly due to vast variations in budgetary support provided from year to year and partly due to having any consensus of what ‘complete’ is. Even a summation of budgetary support issues is beyond the scope of this article, but the CSIS strategy for addressing being ‘complete’ is briefly addressed.
Designing for an uncertain future
As local practitioners of project planning, systems building, information management, support of clients and answering to local as well as distant priorities, we are aware that problems are growing, evolving, even changing. Growth comes in numbers of students and (sometimes) staff to serve them plus numbers of education and support programs. Needs evolve: sometimes due to population demographics, sometimes due to policy and political variations or possibly just due to the technology available and desired by clients. Plus, change can be abrupt. What was an appropriate response one day may no longer be acceptable on the morrow. Hardly an exhaustive list, but one gets the picture. And, just to complete the picture, other states also find their work to be evolving and incomplete—though size is another matter as California is the ‘gorilla of gorillas.’ In any case, once the problem is known, work can start in earnest.
Setting the goals and having an approach
Though CSIS was the agency created to address a variety of challenges faced by LEAs in trying to manage student information, it would be folly to attempt even one challenge alone. Good practice to statewide problem solving is generally good practice in local solving problem. Engaging the Department of Education, local schools and districts, county offices of education, the community of vendors of student information systems, and a variety of public and private education policy interests was the start for CSIS.
The early efforts of CSIS concentrated upon fact gathering, exploring alternatives, building consensus, locating and attracting expertise and attendant activities that are good practice, regardless of scale. The resulting goal statements and approaches to achieving them are addressed more fully in the graph on page 8.
CSIS Program Educational Decision Makers
A founding principle and one that remains important even today, as referenced by Superintendent Jack O’Connell in his inaugural “State of Education” address2 is to reduce local reporting burden. CSIS and the CDE work to transition to processes and procedures that are less demanding of LEA resources than is the case with traditional means of CDE data collection.
Recognizing that the implementation of CSIS could only be accomplished by a win-win strategy, the work began to build local student information systems (SIS) capacity and encourage local education agencies (LEAs) to participate in statewide efforts to standardize data formats.
The choice of SIS remains a local choice, but a standard of information interchange was introduced, for moving data among LEAs and from them to the CDE and postsecondary users.
And, while SIS solutions vary, the products need contain common core functionality and data elements. Element values do not need to be consistent from one installation to the next, but must have a consistent local meaning that can be translated into and from the statewide value. From there, a ‘bridging system’ or ‘data exchange utility’ can assure ‘standards without standardization.’ In other words, local practice and need continue to be satisfied without sacrificing the ability to meaningfully share data among external authorized educational users of that data.
The challenges of a multiple-year implementation with shifting players and deliverables called for the ultimate in flexible solutions. The fundamental approach was to make the ‘data exchange utility’ as generic as is possible. CSIS developed, implemented and maintains the State Reporting and Records Transfer System (SRRTS) which bridges from local users needs to those of statewide users. In one definition, SRRTS can be ‘complete’ when the needs of information exchange become static. Until that happens, consider what it already does in meeting diversity of need.
The SRRTS utility (both the system itself and the client support staff) meets the needs of a challenging diverse community. The median size of a California school district is 1,500 students. And, while one Southern California unified school district has an enrollment of 750,000 students, some 200 districts have no more than 200 students each.
Though SRRTS addresses the sharing of movement of data between and among agencies, it does so at ‘arm’s length’ with little need for technical expertise at local sites. Every interface from a local function to CSIS processing is via a Web page. This portal approach means near universal access is possible and data is always ‘pushed’ from the district or site to CSIS. SRRTS is non-invasive; it cannot directly access local data. The approach is definitely one of investing processing power, support and technical resources at CSIS away form the LEAs.
That is not to infer there are no local costs to participate in CSIS, as there most certainly is a need for local effort and capacity building. CSIS provides incentive funding, often to leverage and enhance existing hardware and software infrastructure that currently exists in the local agency rather than replacing it. From the beginning, CSIS has helped participants to define consortia of one or more school districts, County Superintendents of Schools and other education entities that use common software systems. Providing financial assistance to LEAs in support of their efforts to implement and enhance local student information systems is a primary incentive to participation in what is the voluntary part of CSIS. Recall that recognition of what happens over time? One part of CSIS, the assignment of a Statewide Student Identifier (SSID) became mandatory.
California’s primary response to the “Federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001” is expressed within SB1453. That legislation calls for the establishment and statewide use of a persistent student identifier, consistent with that implemented within CSIS. In short, the CSIS approach to enable LEAs to assign non-ambiguous, non-personally identifiable student identifiers to locally enrolled pupils became the solution to multiple, emergent goals—just what it was designed to do.
Elsewhere
This article provides an overview of CSIS and is augmented by more focused articles elsewhere within this issue of the DataBus:
• The necessity of expecting and planning for change within districts is addressed in “Sustaining Change: Making the Paradigm Shift Across Your District” addresses necessary local change
• “Meeting the Challenge of N-Users” presents the challenges and a solution to issues of scale
• Meeting the mandate aspect of CSIS is described in “Support Structure Approach for Statewide Student Identifier Project.”
Questions may be directed to L. Russ Brawn, Chief Operating Officer, California School Information Services at (916) 325-9200 or rbrawn@csis.k12.ca.us.
Footnotes
1 Initial legislation (AB 107, Chapter 282 of 1997 item 6110-101-0349) provided for the CSIS program and placed it under the auspices of the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team administered by Kern County’s Superintendent of Schools.
Subsequent legislation (AB 1115, Chapter 78 of 1999) further clarified the mission of CSIS.
Further legislation (SB 1453, Chapter 782 of 2002) calls for the local use of a unique pupil identifier number developed pursuant to that used within CSIS, to ensure the most accurate data possible and assist districts in building accurate systems for tracking individual pupil performance. Eligibility for one-time funding for LEAs participation in the CSIS Program is defined within SB1453.
2 Superintendent O’Connell points to CSIS as ‘the good news’ to help in getting quality data and reducing the burden on local districts and schools. The full State of Education in California Address and additional background information, are available at www.cde.ca.gov/stateofeducation.
