Knox County School System and Partnership Initiative Fund
Education Management Information System (EMIS) Project
In November 2007, the Knox County Board of Education established four interrelated and dependent student achievement goals – 100% of entering high school freshmen will be completers, 90% of completers will graduate with a regular diploma, 90% of regular diploma graduates will take the ACT, and 90% of ACT takers will score a composite 21 or higher. Taken together, the goals translate into 73% of all students who enter Knox County high schools graduating with a regular diploma and scoring a composite 21 or higher on the ACT. From the latest available data, the current success rate is 49%, a fifty-one percentage point gap.
The Chamber has agreed to help the Knox County School System (KCS) meet the 100/90/90/90 goals set by the school board. School system management concedes that it cannot close the forty percentage point gap until it has better information to manage by. Everyone agrees that the raw data is there: The task is to locate it, and then transform it into useable management information.
The Chamber has solicited private sector resources for an eighteen month long project to design, develop, and implement systems for getting relevant, timely information into the hands of administrators and school principals. The Chamber is working with the school system to put in place:
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A system to manage the cost to operate each Knox County school,
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A better way to pull together data from the many electronic and manual databases that the school system maintains,
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Methods for measuring how well the system, its students, and each of its schools is progressing toward the board’s goals, and
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Other data reporting routines to provide management the information it needs to support decision making.
The project is proceeding along three tracks –
Track 1: Design, develop, and implement an operating cost management model at the KCS school level, including identifying and documenting sources for financial data. Modify accounting policies and procedures as necessary to capture actual school level operating costs. Train principals and administrators how to use the model to budget and manage school operating costs. Once the operating cost management model is in place, enlist volunteers from the management ranks of local businesses to mentor KCS principals and administrators.
Track 2: Develop a proposal for an Education Management Information System using proven data warehousing technology and decision support software. The proposed system will be designed to extract academic assessment, demographic, and operating cost data from disparate sources and store that data in a data warehouse, where it will be available for reporting, analyzing, and tracking financial and non-financial performance at the student, teacher, school, and school system levels. The EMIS proposal will be made to and approved by the board of education.
Track 3: The EMIS will be finalized and implemented. The EMIS will be installed, tested, debugged, and turned over to KCS for ongoing management and maintenance. Each level of KCS management will undergo training in how to use the decision support software. Standard reports will be designed and pushed out to users. Desktop dashboard tools will also be developed.
Helpful Resources:
Video of Launch Presentation - December 11, 2009