BILL ANALYSIS
AB 2265
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Date of Hearing: April 21, 2010
ASSEMBLY COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS
Felipe Fuentes, Chair
AB 2265 (Salas) - As Amended: April 14, 2010
Policy Committee: Education
Vote:6-0
Urgency: No State Mandated Local Program:
No Reimbursable: No
SUMMARY
This bill establishes a grant program to support local education
agencies (LEAs) direct-funded charter schools; Specifically,
this bill:
1)Authorizes subject to appropriation, an annual local data
management support (LDMS) grant of $5,000 for LEAs and
direct-funded charter schools with an enrollment between one
and 1,000 to receive $5,000 annually, and $5 per pupil for
LEAs and direct-funded charter schools with an enrollment of
1,001 or more.
2)Requires the State Department of Education (SDE) to prorate
the allocations for this program if funds appropriated in the
annual budget act are insufficient to provide full statutory
funding.
3)Requires SDE to allocate program funding to LEAs and
direct-funded charter schools that do the following: (a)
resolve problems related to the statewide student identifier
(SSID) assigned to enrolled pupils; (b) include the SSID on
the transcript of each pupil; and (c) maintain one generic
email address for local information technology personnel to
facilitate communication between SDE and the appropriate LEA
personnel.
4)Requires LEAs and direct-funded charter schools to use funds
to support staff, hardware/software acquisitions, training,
and other activities related to meeting the requirements of
the California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System
(CALPADS).
FISCAL EFFECT
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Annual GF/98 costs of approximately $31.1 million to fund an
LDMS program.
The governor's January 2009 proposed budget provides $10.8
million GF/98 and federal funds for CALPDAS. Of this amount,
$4.8 million are federal Title VI funds, which are provided to
states to support data systems and statewide assessment
programs. Of the $10.8 million, $1.26 million is for state and
LEA costs related to the maintenance and support of SSIDs.
COMMENTS
1)Purpose . In February 2009, EdSource released a report
entitled Making California's New Data System Work: Quality is
Key. This report details the importance of the SSID and the
challenges LEAs experience in ensuring data via the SSID is
accurate. Specifically, EdSource states, "Managing
student-level data through an SSID number is an on-going task
that can be time-consuming and complicated. As school
employees learn to use SSIDs to report student information,
they are finding that the quality of the data in the state's
database depends on the combined effort of all LEAs."
In 2008, the Superintendent of Public Instruction (SPI) and
the Governor commissioned a report entitled: Framework for a
Comprehensive Education Data System in California - Unlocking
the Power of Data to Continually Improve Public Education,
from the consulting firm McKinsey and Co., to provide the
state with a long-term implementation plan for a comprehensive
student data system. According to EdSource, the McKinsey
report argues that "improving accuracy of education data in
California cannot be accomplished without an appropriate level
of investment in data quality initiatives. They note the plan
they recommend would cost the state between $32 million and
$66 million in one-time costs and $4 million to $8 million in
on-going annual costs. Both the one-time and on-going costs
are similar to those currently spent on IT projects, the
report points out." This bill authorizes LEAs and
direct-funded charter schools to receive a LDMS grant, as
specified.
2)The CALPADS , established by SB 1453 (Alpert), Chapter 1002,
Statutes of 2002, required the SDE to track student
achievement in order to comply with the federal No Child Left
Behind Act of 2001. A longitudinal database requires
individual student identifiers be given to each student
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enrolled in the public K-12 system. In the 2004-05 fiscal
year, school districts were provided incentive funding to
create these identifiers and establish systems to maintain
them. SDE began to fully implement CALPADS in the fall of
2009.
In November 2009, IBM was awarded the contract to develop
software for CALPADS. Between August and October 2009, IBM
released software to LEAs to perform the administrative and
practical function associated with collecting and reporting
student level data.
3)CALPDAS system issues . In January 2010, SABOT Technologies
issued a report on the status of the CALPADS system. The
report recommended the CALPADS project be stopped until the
following four major areas are addressed: (a) technical
architecture, (b) personnel, (c) engineering processes, and
(d) project management. According to SABOT, the stop
recommendation is "based on the overall status of the system,
our root cause analysis of the systems issues, and the
project's overall performance. This rating further means that
there are critical risks to the project's success that without
immediate and decisive action will increase in likelihood.
There is a high probability of project and system failure
should the project continue on the present path."
In response to this report, the SPI ordered LEAs to
discontinue the majority of data collections via the CALPADS
system. The SPI indicated SDE and IBM will develop a
stabilization plan and perform a comprehensive system review
that will test process on all CALPADS functions and
components. This review occurred between February and late
March of this year.
On March 26, 2010, SDE released a communication to LEAs that
states: "While good progress has been made towards stabilizing
the system, a few defects as well as some performance issues
remain. Due to these remaining issues, the SPI has opted to
delay the March 29 [data] release until all of these issues
can be addressed."
Analysis Prepared by : Kimberly Rodriguez / APPR. / (916)
319-2081