Texas school districts say upgrades to the state’s student data reporting system could hurt funding

The Texas Tribune

Upgrades to the system Texas uses to collect student, staff and financial data from school districts are causing serious concerns among school administrators and data specialists across the state who say the changes have led to thousands of unresolved errors that could potentially cause them to lose out on state funding.

Each of Texas’ more than 1,200 school districts is required to regularly submit data to the state, including information on attendance, enrollment, students who receive special education, children experiencing homelessness and the number of kids who have completed a college preparatory course. State officials use the information to determine whether schools are meeting performance standards and how much funding they receive each year.

Three years ago, the Texas Education Agency announced major changes to the reporting system. The goal was to make it easier for school districts and the state to share data and reduce the amount of manual labor required from school officials. Districts were supportive of the proposed changes.

Almost a dozen other states are using the same standard on which Texas based its system upgrade, said Eric Jansson, vice president of technology for Ed-Fi Alliance, the organization that created the standard. Texas is the largest state to implement the changes.

More than 300 districts participated in the pilot program during the last school year, according to the TEA. All school districts began using the new system this school year.

Before the upgrade, school districts would submit data directly to the TEA after working with a software vendor that would ensure the education agency didn’t have any problems interpreting the information.

Under the new arrangement, the software vendors are now responsible for transmitting the data to the state, a change that school officials say leaves them without a chance to fact-check the information before it goes out.

They also say a litany of errors and inaccuracies surfaced during the pilot program. In some instances, hundreds of student records — from enrollment figures to the number of students in certain programs — did not show up correctly.

A TEA spokesperson said the agency is confident districts will have ample time to resolve any errors between now and the first reporting deadline on Dec. 12. The agency also noted that districts have until Jan. 16 to resubmit any data needing corrections.

But districts say they have no idea how to solve some errors. Their concerns, shared in interviews with The Texas Tribune, have not been previously reported.

In an August letter to TEA Commissioner Mike Morath, Lewisville Independent School District Superintendent Lori Rapp requested that the agency delay the full transition to the new reporting system until all districts are able to submit “100% of all data elements” successfully.

Rapp said thousands of errors surfaced after the district’s software vendor submitted data to the new system during the pilot. Her staff spent “tons of hours” trying to figure out why the miscalculations had occurred, she said in an interview.

While Rapp’s staff had made some progress working with the new system since the pilot started, ”(w)e have not been able to fully send, promote, and validate our data to the point where a successful submission could have been made,” Rapp’s letter said.

After receiving the note, the TEA organized a virtual meeting with Lewisville ISD officials to discuss their concerns. Rapp said the state did not seem concerned about whether school districts were prepared to make the transition.

“Maybe because there’s no ramifications to them and the stakes aren’t as high, they don’t have a concern,” Rapp said. “But for districts, the stakes are extremely high, and it’s a gross oversight on their part if they are failing to recognize that.”

While the TEA says it has resolved more than a thousand tickets submitted by school officials reporting problems with the new system, officials from nearly a half-dozen districts told the Tribune the state has not explained what’s causing some of the errors or told them if they have been resolved.

School administrators and data specialists who participated in the pilot say the implications of adopting a system that still doesn’t have a clear process to correct mistakes are massive. An inaccurate assessment of the students enrolled in Texas public schools could mean school districts receive less funding from the state. Schools are funded based on students’ average daily attendance, and they receive additional dollars if they have children with specific needs, like students with disabilities or kids learning English as a second language.

Funding has been a major point of contention between Texas schools and state officials in recent years. Many districts entered the school year having to spend more money than they have, largely because of the state’s rising costs of living and a half-decade of no increases to the base-level funding they receive from the state. Public school leaders remain upset that last year’s legislative sessions ended with no significant raises despite the state having a record $32 billion surplus.

Texas’ school accountability system also relies on the data school districts submit to the state. Some parents rely on those performance metrics to make decisions on where to enroll their children. Poor performance can also lead to state intervention — like it happened when the state ousted Houston ISD’s locally elected school board and superintendent last year.

Full accountability ratings have not been released in five years due to litigation over changes to how districts are evaluated. Many have publicly released their unofficial ratings to share their progress with their communities.

School districts say they can’t afford to have mistakes in their student data.

“I think everybody understands the situation that public education is in right now,” said Frisco ISD Superintendent Mike Waldrip. “And there is no confidence by anyone that I’ve spoken with that that data is accurate or will be accurate when it comes time to submit it to the state.”

School districts that have piloted the new system say they understand errors are part of the process. They just wanted more time to troubleshoot them before it went live.

“We need more answers around not only supporting the system to be successful, but while we are making sure that it’s successful, how are we going to continue to assure that we’re not suffering consequences for a delay or inaccuracies in the data?” said Mark White, assistant superintendent of accountability for the Tomball Independent School District. “And none of those assurances have been received by districts.”

A TEA spokesperson said the agency did not see a need to expand the trial period because the pilot showed the channels through which it receives data from software vendors worked.

The TEA said it plans to continue working with districts to help resolve any errors well before the first reporting deadline. The agency said districts should reach out if they are still experiencing problems.

Tammy Eagans, who oversees the student data reporting process for Leon ISD, said the agency was helpful throughout the pilot year whenever the school district had problems submitting information. She added that the task of switching to the new system may not pose the same problems for her small district of fewer than 800 students as it might for larger districts with thousands of children.

Still, she said she is “not 100% confident” that the system as it’s being rolled out works as intended. Extending the pilot “would not have been a bad idea,” Eagans said. But she is also hopeful that the education agency will be understanding of districts’ concerns and not blame them for errors out of their control.

The upcoming reporting deadline “just kind of puts a little extra pressure on us,” said Eagans, adding that she’s “a little nervous, a little apprehensive, but hoping that it goes smoother than I think it will.”

Other school officials say the pilot was unsuccessful, and if adopting the new system requires more time, the state should be willing to cooperate. The looming fall reporting deadline is “the most important” submission of the school year, said Tomball ISD Superintendent Martha Salazar-Zamora.

“If the data is inaccurate, then we live with that inaccuracy throughout the entire year,” she said. “So it has a lot of relevance on many levels.”

Mary Mitchem, a former TEA employee, said she started worrying about the system’s readiness shortly after she was hired in June to make sure the system met the needs of its users. Mitchem said she left the agency last month after a dispute over a leave of absence request.

Within days of being hired, she said it appeared that no one had done the work to ensure the data coming from software vendors accurately translated into the education agency’s system. Having worked on other major data projects throughout her career, she said she was also surprised that, two months before the pilot was set to conclude, no one had audited or tested the system.

“You’re converting a state accounting system, and you have to make sure it balances — you have to,” said Mitchem.

Mitchem sounded the alarm up the chain of command, but a supervisor told her that anything beyond making sure the data was flowing into the new system was the responsibility of the software vendors and school districts.

“It just blew my mind,” Mitchem said.

In early August, she sent an email to Morath saying, “You will be in litigation if you don’t help fix it, and it will be with the largest districts in the state of Texas.”

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This story was originally published by The Texas Tribune and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.