Burnt Orange Report

Crazy cool teacher tech.

By Jim Dallas

You know how your teachers in high school would drone on ominously about your "permanent record?" Did you ever wonder if there actually was such a thing?

Turns out they weren't kidding - but that isn't a bad thing.

Slashdot.org user rhadamanthus links to a Houston Chronicle article on the emergence of a new database which lets teachers tap into student records. To help them keep track of student progress and prevent dropouts.

While many paranoid cyberlibertarians (get down! black helicopter!) won't like this, I think it's about time that teachers were able to put all that information the public school bureaucracy collects to good use. You can't help kids unless you can know who they are and what they are about.

And the increase in access will help to end corrupt practices which hurt kids, such as the blatantly fraudulent misreporting of dropout rates that has burned HISD recently:

Starting with an investigation of possible dropout reporting fraud at Sharpstown High School and culminating with a state audit that may lower the district's accountability rating, HISD has come to know how badly it handles some student data.

"The dropout issue is a key battleground for our future," Stockwell said. "We must keep these students in school and learning. Failure is not an option."

The Sharpstown investigation showed that employees can and have changed student records to reflect lower dropout rates. The state investigation and one by a district task force exposed computer records managed so badly that the district has no way of knowing where students have gone.

(Incidentally, David Brin, who delivered the 2000 keynote speech to the Libertarian national convention, wrote a whole book about this debate).

And even if the idea has visions of 1984 dancing in your head, remember this. Private sector employers do this on a routine basis.

Unfortunately, putting together student records in a useful way is not at all routine in education. The system (called the Profiler for Academic Success of Students, or PASS), is the first of its kind in the entire country (HISD press release).

HISD should be commended for this innovative approach to monitoring students' needs.