The latest knowledge efforts in public education have been dictated by government regulations such as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). School processes are changing to meet new NCLB requirements and, in the process, have had to often upgrade their technical capabilities. For example, before NCLB, longitudinal student data was only collected by a handful of states. Now, about half of the states are equipped with systems to collect longitudinal student data, mainly to meet NCLB and state reporting requirements. A 2002 policy brief published by the Education Commission of the States provides a clear explanation of how NCLB would impact state information systems.
By upgrading their processes and relevant systems, states have increased their technical capacity for coordinating different sources of knowledge. Linking attendance data with performance data at the individual level creates a more complete picture of a student, empowering schools with new knowledge. However, with these upgrades, many districts have also found themselves grappling with different types of systems and even more data and content.
In my next posting I will briefly describe a couple of these systems and the challenges they pose.
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