NYC School Administrators Improve the Educational Process With Web-Based Information Systems

Education is the principal foundation of a civilized society. It is through education that the knowledge that sustains a culture is passed from one generation to the next. With the advent of the Information Age and the growth of our technological society, the educational process has necessarily become more complex.

The quest for better administrative efficiency in schools, and thus a better quality of education for students, has led some public school districts to implement a business model concept for administrative tasks. This model includes the idea of viewing school principals and other key administrators as resource managers as well as educators. By providing them with the latest technologies, they can better track and cross-reference key student information in areas such as registers, cross-school attendance, exam performance, and the demographic composition of classes.

At the same time, schools are looking for ways to provide easier access to student information across a broader spectrum, including principals, parents, and the students themselves. The World Wide Web is being used to expand the reach and breadth of traditional information systems without incurring heavy system development costs.

"We are saving a large amount of money by using the Web while improving the quality of education for our children," enthuses Kamal S. Kumar, Director, Office of Student Systems Development, who is developing an Internet-based Decision Support System (DSS) for New York City public school administrators, as requested by the city's Board of Education ( BOE ).** "We're giving administrators easier and broader access to student information while saving money in the process – an unbeatable combination."

Administrators need only a Web browser to tap into the vast realm of online information. The architectural simplicity of browsers makes them highly portable, presenting a consistent interface no matter what desktop operating system is used. There is no need to install and maintain multiple applications on the desktop. And these applications are easy to keep current and up-to-date, since they only need to be updated on the server rather than on multiple clients.

Broadening the Scale

The New York City Board of Education oversees the largest public school system in the United States, serving nearly 1.1 million students from pre-kindergarten to twelfth grade attending over 1,100 public schools. In addition, it has one of the most diverse student populations in the world, with nearly 200 different home languages representing nearly every country in the world.

With such a large and complex educational network, the task of providing up-to-date student information to Central BOE staff and 40 superintendents, as well as more than 1,100 school principals around the city, was a daunting prospect for Kumar. "If we were simply to develop the Decision Support System based on an expanded client/server computing model, it would be a logistical and monetary nightmare," Kumar exclaims. "We would have to deploy the DSS software on the desktop computers of all the 1,100 principals spread around the city. And, quite aside from the initial installation cost, every time we added software or updated existing software, we would have to visit every site. With a Web-enabled Decision Support System, on the other hand, we only have to install one set of software at one location."

Smooth Transition

The Board was already using Information Builders' FOCUS Desktop software for information analysis and reporting, so Kumar and his team were pleased to learn that there was an easy way to Web-enable these applications with WebFOCUS. "WebFOCUS allows us to make a smooth transition to the Internet, because we already run FOCUS on the mainframe and FOCUS Desktop for client/server development," Kumar explains. "The two systems are similar, so as we develop the Web side of the DSS, we're basically using the same FOCUS code that is on the client/server system. The main difference is the output – WebFOCUS automatically generates HTML code."

The main thrust of the DSS is to give school administrators a quick look at trends in order to plan for the future. "Right now, the DSS is only student-specific," continues Kumar. "It handles student attendance, registers, and exam scores in reading and math. In future releases we'll be providing data to assist in principal performance reviews, teacher attendance, and budgeting."

Data resides in an IBM DB2 database on the mainframe. This data is accessed through Information Builders' EDA* middleware over an LU2 network connection. The front-end, built using FOCUS Desktop, runs on Windows NT platforms.

Web-enabling the DSS involved replacing the existing front-end with browsers connected to Web servers that were in turn connected to WebFOCUS. FOCUS queries running inside WebFOCUS access statistical data, and the result is presented as HTML tables or Style Sheets to create graphs.

Kenneth R. Garcia, Project Liaison, broke the Web conversion effort down into three areas: Attendance, Exams, and Registers. The Attendance piece was handled by a team of two New York University (NYU) students who were participating in the project as interns. "This was a real eye-opener for us, in terms of how easily the students got a grip on the use of WebFOCUS," Garcia says. "With no previous FOCUS knowledge, they were able to complete their project within five weeks."

Show and Tell

Once the Web system architecture was in place and shortly after the end of the NYU semester, NYU staged a demonstration for all the interns and their projects at the NYU computer science department. "I set up the client/server interface on my laptop, and the BOE student team set up the Web system on a PC," Garcia relates. "People were able to see the 'before and after' of the systems, and there were a lot of smiles all around."

Ultimately, Kumar envisions a Web-enabled system that will allow student information to be accessed not only by board members, the chancellor, superintendents, central staff, and principals, but also by students and their parents. "We'll be able to provide relevant data, filtered for their consumption, on a scale not previously available," says Kumar. "We've received lots of positive feedback."

With the DSS project itself, school administrators and principals can identify trends in student performance by school grade, ethnicity, or gender – and respond to problems accordingly. Feedback from principals is already confirming Kumar's enthusiasm for the project. "With DSS I was able to focus on areas that directly improve our students' achievement and attendance data, and to look at specific student populations within the school, in order to design programs that meet their needs," says Anthony Warner, Principal at PS/MS 015.

Rose Clunie, Principal at MS 321, confirms the ease of accessing and using student data: "Prior to DSS, student data was a puzzle to be solved," she says. "Now that I've been introduced to this state-of-the-art system, I can easily manipulate data and use it more often to inform instruction."

Similar positive responses were garnered from a group of 25 principals who were given a demonstration of DSS. "Astonishment is the best way to describe the response," Clunie smiles. "Every principal at the presentation now wants to have access to DSS. Its potential to facilitate positive student outcomes appears to be endless."

Thanks to WebFOCUS, these principals and other school professionals can quickly home in on the information they need to make informed, analytical decisions. The DSS has been accepted as part of the prestigious Computerworld Smithsonian Awards' Permanent Research Collection on Information Technology at the National Museum of American History, based primarily on the originality of this new business model for school administration. "I think we've really got something here with WebFOCUS," Kumar concludes. "We are giving our educators a better business tool and opening up access to information that makes a difference in the quality of our education and, ultimately, the quality of our lives."

(*Note:EDA is now part of iWay Software's product suite)

(**Note:Renamed the Department of Education)