Can State Reporting for Schools be Easy?

https://youtu.be/5Sae3BwXtfQ

Presented by Rebecca Coleman – Transcription Below

Introduction

Welcome to the Illuminate Whiteboard Series. My name is Rebecca Coleman, and I am a Customer Success Manager on the Illuminate Student Information System team. Today, we’re gonna talk about making state reporting a piece of cake. First, we’re gonna take a little brief at why is state reporting important to teachers, then administration, and finally what can you do to help your state reporting people get through this process as easily as possible. State reporting is not just something that your individual person responsible for that data collection needs to be worried about.

What to Tell the Government?

It’s something that tells the federal government or your local agencies how your school district is doing overall, whether they’re being successful in standardized testing or not. Now, there are some level of soft skills that don’t get taking into account for in state reporting, but generally, this is the report card of how your district is doing. So if you have a person who is constantly sending information out to you or to your school site telling you you need to update this information or that information, they are specifically looking for detailed data that’s going to either go into your local state system or eventually up to the federal government.

How Does This Apply to Teachers?

So for teachers, lots of you may be wondering if you’re watching this as a teacher, “Why does this matter to me?” Because eventually, this is what pays your salary for one thing, but the other thing and the more important piece of it is that state reporting is what’s going to help your district receive additional funding. If you’re looking at how can I best support the diverse body of students that you have in front of you, you have to know that diverse body of students, and some of that data is gonna come from other school districts and the information they’ve put up to the state but also what you guys are putting up as an organization as well.

This Affects Everyone!

So keeping in mind that this is not something that’s just a, “I don’t care about this because the district office handles it,” kind of thing is really important as an educator. And you can help doing that by making sure that the information that you provide to the office about your students is as succinct and correct and up to the minute as humanly possible. Next, we’re gonna look at this administration team and we’re gonna ask ourselves why does this matter to them. Well, it matters to the administrators in the district or charter because they are the ones who are going to be disaggregating this data and discussing it at the district or state or fed level.

What Are They Looking For?

They are gonna be looking at how many student groups do I have? What are my socioeconomically disadvantaged students? How are we identifying and servicing and better supporting those students to be successful? If you don’t have the answer to that question, then where are you going to look? Well, you’re going to look for the people that are managing your student data, and ultimately, those are gonna be the people that are worrying about this piece of cake.

What Can We Do With This Information?

So if we look at what we can do to help with that information, is that you can talk to your teachers about making sure that their data is as up to date as possible. You can have conversations with all of the members of your team to make sure that you are giving the most accurate information as possible and better than that, when somebody asks you to look at the information that they’re going to be certifying, you need to look at that information and actually validate that it’s right. Because if you’re telling an organization at the state or federal level that you have 75 ELD students, then that better actually be your count.

Conclusion

So how can we help? We can help by making sure that as district personnel or teachers or administrators that we are actually providing and synthesizing the data correctly, that we are supporting them by getting information back to them as quickly as possible, and making sure that we’re helping make this piece of cake as easy to eat as they can. Thank you very much for joining us today in this Illuminate Whiteboard Series.

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Illuminate Education is a provider of educational technology and services offering innovative data, assessment and student information solutions. Serving K-12 schools, our cloud-based software and services currently assist more than 1,600 school districts in promoting student achievement and success.

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