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Wednesday, September 10, 2014

The First Step in Student Data Tracking. Your District’s Student Information System. | Missouri Education Watchdog

The First Step in Student Data Tracking. Your District’s Student Information System. | Missouri Education Watchdog:



The First Step in Student Data Tracking. Your District’s Student Information System.

infinite campus logo
We will be writing more in the next few weeks about the data gathering and tracking of children at school, how it is gathered and where it goes for ‘research’.   The first gathering point of student data comes from your school’s Student Information System (SIS).  My school district uses Infinite Campus for its data tracking of its students.    Here’s a visual of what Infinite Campus (or any other SIS) gathers to gauge ‘student achievement’.  From wikipedia:

(click on graphic to enlarge)
student data management
A student information system (SIS) is a software application for education establishments to manage student data. Student Information Systems (often abbreviated as SIS systems) provide capabilities for entering student test and other assessment scores, build student schedules, track student attendance, and manage many other student-related data needs in a school.
The SIS is equivalent to an Enterprise Resource Planning or ERP system for a corporate customer. As such, many of the issues with ERP System Selection Methodology, implementation, and operation of an ERP system apply too.

You can see this information includes: assessment, transportation, food services, library data and other data for the school is gathered as well: human resource, finance, special education and‘other’.  Does that ‘other’ include assessments as they pertain to attitudes, values and beliefs?  Watch these data sets of ‘other’.
As stated above, the SIS is equivalent to an Enterprise Resource Planning or ERP system for a corporate customer. As such, many of the issues with ERP System Selection Methodology, implementation, and operation of an ERP system apply too.
Let’s look at what an ERP System means and as you read the definition, think about how it fits into a school building and the purpose of education and how your child is considered by the system:


ERP provides an integrated view of core business processes, often in real-time, using common databases maintained by a database management system. ERP systems track business resources—cash, raw materials, production capacity—and the status of business commitments: orders, purchase orders, and payroll. The applications that make up the system share data across the various departments (manufacturing, purchasing, sales, accounting, etc.) that provide the data.  ERP facilitates information flow between all business functions, and manages connections to outside stakeholders.
Enterprise system software is a multi-billion dollar industry that produces components that support a variety of business functions. IT investments have become the largest category of capital expenditure in United States-based businesses over the past decade. Though early ERP systems focused on large enterprises, smaller enterprises increasingly use ERP systems.
The ERP system is considered a vital organizational tool because it integrates varied The First Step in Student Data Tracking. Your District’s Student Information System. | Missouri Education Watchdog: