The EdVocate West

Losers Again.

May 25, 2010 at 12:28 am arunramanathan Leave a comment

You gotta wonder about our wonderful state. Here we are – the eighth largest economy in the world. More students that any other state. More Latino students than the total student enrollment of 48 states. More English learners than the total student enrollment of 38 states. The center of technological innovation in the country. The home of Silicon Valley. The home of nearly every major tech company in the United States.

Between the needs of our student population and the expertise of one of the state’s premier industries, how could we come out on the losing side of a multimillion dollar application to fund our state-wide data system (after coming in 27th on the first round of the Race to the Top application)?

Are we that pathetic?

Here are the winners:

“In total, $250 million was awarded this year through the SLDS grant competition.  States received varying award sizes based on differing needs and requests.  The full list of award winners is: Arkansas - $9.8 million; Colorado – $17.4 million; Florida – $10.0 million; Illinois – $11.9 million; Kansas – $9.1 million; Maine – $7.3 million; Massachusetts – $13.0 million; Michigan – $10.6 million; Minnesota – $12.4 million; Mississippi – $7.6 million; New York – $19.7 million; Ohio – $5.1 million; Oregon – $10.5 million; Pennsylvania – $14.3 million; South Carolina – $14.9 million; Texas – $18.2 million; Utah – $9.6 million; Virginia – $17.5 million; Washington – $17.3 million; Wisconsin – $13.8 million.  All 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands applied.”

As you can see, a whole lot of money was lost. And the loss was devastating for proponents of our statewide data system. The dollars would have:

• Expanded our existing systems to include preschool students and include college and career indicators.
• Renovated the California State University (CSU) data system to link it to K-12.
• Built a high-quality P-20 Longitudinal Data Warehouse in order to link and report education data from preschool through postsecondary.
• Allowed researchers to use data from this system to allow educational policymakers to make “informed” decisions about educational investments

Our existing state data system, CALPADs, has had performance issues that have made it difficult – if not impossible—for districts to submit data to the system. And its possible that the feds might have decided that it wasn’t a good idea to give us money to expand a system that isn’t currently working. If that’s the case than the folks responsible for the CALPADs debacle now have two black marks instead of one on their record and the question is whether we should be turning over this work to someone/anyone with the ability to make this critical system work. We should also be doing an in-depth investigation into how this situation got screwed up in the first place.

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