ELQIS data meeting

Off to the ELQIS data meeting this morning. Hope to see you there. I have high hopes for this group.

Update: Well that was a disappointment. I got an email from our local office of education a few days ago inviting me to my usual video conference site, since I was on their list from before, but when I got there, it wasn't a video conference at all but video streaming. We could watch them on TV together, but we couldn't participate. I didn't bother. I went to the conflicting meeting I had been going to miss, where at least I could participate.

I've read the interim report, and I'll read what comes out of today, but I can watch them on TV in the privacy of my own office, where the coffee is better, the chair softer, the bathroom closer, and I can put it on pause when I need to leave the room.

The whole idea of replacing video conferencing with video streaming is a big disappointment and will reduce participation. What are they thinking? It must be a budget decision. Otherwise it's dumb.

Data gone wild

This is an article in Wired about parents who track everything about their kid, because with modern technology, they can. I'm sympathetic to this. When you have a kid, it becomes your hobby. (At least, it became ours.) It's what you and your partner do in the evening, sit around and watch the kid and talk about it. Less so with later ones, but the first one is enthralling.

And if you're a data geek and a technology freak (like the economists in the article, on both counts), why not use technology to keep track of stuff? There may, for all one knows, be some use for it later on, but for a real data geek, keep track of something is its own reward, and I sympathize greatly with the affliction.

So now that you can, for example, use an iPhone app to enter data on when the kid sleeps, wakes, poops, or cries, and some toys record how they are played with, we can each be our own Darwin, observing our kids just for the hell of it.

The Wired article has some links to devices and software you can purchase.

ELQIS data meeting

You can stream today's ELQIS data subcommittee meeting (agenda) or attend.

9:45 Somebody asked whether anybody had thought about connecting the data silos. They danced around an answer. The answer should have been that what they call data buckets are tables in a relational database. Of course they communicate. The way you do it is to write a query.

They don't seem to think it is important to distinguish different classrooms in a facility or sessions in a program. I think it is. Except for those lacunae, I think they got the tables right.

10:30 The CDE data guy explaining CalPADS thinks it's okay to plan for different identifiers for Pre-K, K-12, and college. Why in the world would you want to do that?

10:35 They MAY start having unique identifiers in non-LEA centers. May? May? Why would you throw away data?

10:45 How about having the R&R issue SSIDs for non-LEAs?

Done. All in all, I see reason for hope. They seemed to be taking people's suggestions seriously, and there were no extreme positions being pushed, although a number of folks had strong feelings about details. It was all in a spirit of figuring out how to do this.

I like that Nancy Remley skipped discussion of whether a unique identifier was important and got right into how to make it work. You can't have a data system like this without unique identifiers, so there's no sense discussing whether to have them.

P-20 data system and a national ID card

SB5X-2 would create a P-20 CDE data system to follow students from Pre-K through a doctoral degree.

(3) The bill would state the intent of the Legislature to create a Preschool through Higher Education (P-20) statewide longitudinal educational data system in order to inform education policy and improve instruction, and to use this P-20 system for state-level research to improve instruction. The bill would additionally state the Legislature’s intent to require the State Department of Education, the Commission on Teacher Credentialing, the California Community Colleges, the University of California, the California State University, and any other state education agency to be required to disclose, or redisclose, personally identifiable pupil records to this P-20 system, as permissible under state and federal law.

This brings up an issue where I disagree with lots of my fellow liberals. I think this is a great idea. To make it work, we have to have unique identifiers for all kids, so we can track their progress even if they switch schools (which they pretty much all do when they go to middle school, high school, and college).

Connecting the Dots

God was that boring. I "attended" a webinar today on Connecting the Dots -- Early Childhood Data Collections by Federal Programs, with people from Head Start, the Child Care Bureau, and Office of Special Education Programs of the Department of Education reading their PowerPoints. A lot of it was new to me, but they might as well have just emailed the PowerPoint.

ACS and rural counties

For data junkies, the Census Bureau has just released a document discussing the American Community Survey. It is nominally for rural counties, but it has lots of interesting stuff for all of us.