Technical glitches lead to extended deadlines for CalPADS reports
Published: March 1, 2010
The California Department of Education is giving local educational agencies more time to file required data as state officials work to resolve “unacceptable performance issues” with the state’s complex California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System.
In a Feb. 11 letter to superintendents and charter school administrators, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell conceded publicly what many beleaguered LEAs have been saying privately for months: CalPADS is not working for many users—making it impossible for many of them to submit required data and eating up hours of staff time in the effort.
O’Connell said he has directed IBM—the state’s main CalPADS contractor—and state CalPADS staff to conduct a thorough “top to bottom” review of the system “to correct all deficiencies and ensure that the system performs efficiently.” The state has reportedly committed $15 million to IBM, Microsoft Corp. and other contractors for developing and implementing the system.
In addition, O’Connell said, the state has taken a number of steps to support LEAs that are struggling with the system, including indefinitely extending data submission deadlines and subsequent state certification of the numbers.
“Over the next two months, the CALPADS project team will continue to assist LEAs [in obtaining Statewide Student Identifiers and submitting [2009–10 enrollment and 2008–09 data for graduation and dropout counts], but in recognition of all these challenges, the exact certification deadline date will not be determined until the system is stabilized. The deadline, however, will not be prior to May 2010,” O’Connell wrote.
The state has also changed the rules for late fall, spring and year-end data reports. LEAs will only be required to submit “data required for federal reporting,” according to O’Connell’s letter, and should use “traditional means”–their previous reporting systems—rather than CalPADS to do so.
Essential tool
Launched with what state officials now admit were “overly ambitious” expectations last fall, CalPADS—once it’s functional—will be the largest K–12 student data system in the country. Designed to track students individually throughout their public school careers, the system is considered an essential tool for accurately gauging what’s going right with California public schools and what needs to be improved.
But the changeover from the state’s old data collection system to CalPADS is extremely complex, requiring districts to reconcile their existing software and processes with a new system that has had significant start-up problems. Because individual LEAs have contracted with any of more than a dozen software vendors, each district’s situation is different.
Keric Ashley, director of CDE’s Data Management Division, said about 100 districts have submitted and certified their required data successfully using CalPADS and a number more could do so if required. “So the system works,” he said, “it’s just a matter of how well it works.”
He said the state has put an “appropriate amount of pressure” on its contractor, IBM, to retest the system and “ensure a better product is made available to school districts.”
Budget cuts compound LEAs’ problems
Some individual software vendors also share responsibility for problems because they have not yet adapted their software to help districts submit data to CalPADS, Ashley said, even as he acknowledged that budget cuts and resulting staff reductions have just made things worse for LEAs.
“On top of all these issues, districts are facing cutbacks,” Ashley said. “They don’t want to cut teachers, and sometimes that means that technicians get cut. At a time when they are learning to use a brand new system, there are fewer resources available.”
Oswaldo Galarza, who supervises technical services for the 43,000-student San Juan Unified School District in Sacramento County, said he dreads the possibility that the district might have to cut its technical staff in the future.
“I think we are all right this year,” Galarza said. “But if we lost any of the folks who are working with CalPADS, we’d lose all that knowledge and expertise.”
Galarza said he does not believe the state’s new deadlines and data submission rules will give his district much relief.
“It means we may have to relearn our old systems and manually report information we may already have tried to submit,” he said. “This could double our work.”
Thus far, CalPADS has been a huge headache for San Juan, Galarza said.
“Every time the state makes a change, we have to go to our software vendor and request changes. Then we have to test it. We wind up caught in the middle. Neither the state nor IBM has shown any indication that they understand how these problems have impacted local districts.”
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