Realizing the Future State of K-12 Public Education: Data Exchange and Functional Integration with Local Government

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INTRODUCTION The Condition of Education 2008 (Planty, 2008) has addressed the areas that most concern the public about U.S. public education. It reports * Persistent disparities in educational performance between Hispanics, other minority students, and whites * Rising public school enrollments * Lagging public high school graduation rates * A long-term rise in spending on public education, and, on the positive side, * A long-term rise in students' reading and math performance. These concerns reflect the embedded logic behind national and state policies and actions: * The problems of public education can be traced to minority and immigrant populations. * These problems are growing quickly. * Success is possible, but only over the long term. * Success is linked to increased funding. * Problem districts have the least financial resources. * The only hope for success is increased state and federal funding. Thus, too often, school districts spend grant money on projects that promise to solve problems and improve student performance, but are not truly sustainable and fail to deliver over the long term. School districts can, however, focus their efforts toward a practical future state that, at the highest level of generality, comprises * A reduced achievement gap * By providing instructional opportunity with current resources and best methods * By providing support services in the school and in the community. * Accommodation for changes in the size of student populations * Cost containment and reliable funding. This paper proposes a best-practices approach that school districts can take, using current methods and resources, to achieve possible goals. It entails * Planning around local conditions and current resources * Planning for sustainability * Maintaining ongoing stakeholder and leadership commitment * Aligning functions and processes * Establishing continuity of funding * Establishing integrated, aligned IT functions * Leveraging current and emerging technologies * Involving partner institutions * Establishing data exchange relationships * Consolidating common functions. Opportunities for improving K-12 education are all around. But few are sustainable, few are sustained, and few survive to deliver real benefits (U. S. Conference of Mayors, 2006, p. 29). Sustainable improvement begins with understanding that dreams entail responsibilities: success comes from institutional alignment behind the vision and not just from the vision alone. Planning receives strong emphasis because it is a process of developing self-knowledge. It opens opportunities, but also exposes vulnerabilities. Emphasis falls especially on understanding the services that information technology provides in the K-12 context and the functions and dependencies that affect service delivery. Institutional planning leads to setting the right priorities, but also to anticipating and remedying causes of failure. Understanding the functional dependencies in the institutions of K-12 education is essential for taking advantage of the opportunities that current and emerging technologies offer for reaching the future state. Emphasis here falls on the opportunities opened up by data exchange technology and the organizational and technical requirements for realizing data exchange between school districts and communities. The methods and considerations discussed here are not new. They are just seldom if ever put together as a strategy for success. PLANNING AROUND LOCAL CONDITIONS State and federal governments commonly attempt to advance K-12 educational improvement by enacting programs that target specific high-level, high-visibility problem areas. …