INDUSTRY

The Pasadena Unified School District (PUSD) in California is introducing a performance management strategy based on Cognos the world leader in enterprise business intelligence (EBI) and corporate performance management solutions. Cognos will provide teachers, administrators and parents with the ability to access and analyze class performance, with the goal of tuning individual student performance based upon assessments correlated with state standards. PUSD has implemented Cognos business intelligence and performance management solutions to help meet information requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, an act that was designed to hold states and schools accountable for the academic achievement of all students, and to demand continuous performance improvement from students and teachers. PUSD wanted to be able to drill deeper into the data to uncover and monitor trends, and pinpoint and immediately address problems with individual students or classrooms. "Over the past 10 years, education has become increasingly data driven," said Phil Hopkins, executive director of information technology, PUSD. "Parents, educators, and lawmakers have placed a high degree of scrutiny on student, teacher and school performance. They want to know the results of individual students and they want to know why those results were achieved." With business intelligence, PUSD is able to look at data multidimensionally, drawing information from an Oracle data warehouse, which aggregates a multitude of data sources, including data on student demographics, HR, facilities, finance, students attendance and grading. These abilities will enable educators to easily identify children that are falling behind, and to empower parents to take specific actions without having to wait for a formal report card to indicate where students are struggling academically. "While everyone supports the goal of measuring student performance, the challenge for most educational institutions is determining and understanding the critical drivers of student performance," said Terence Atkinson, director of public sector solutions, Cognos. "With such insight, educators can make decisions about directing resources to successful initiatives, and rapidly identify when the system is not meeting the needs of individual students."