The National Center for Education Statistics awarded the Oregon Department of Education a $10.5 million grant to help create and implement a statewide database tracking students’ progress from pre-kindergarten through higher education.
The database will resemble a giant transcript recording how individual students progress throughout their primary, secondary and higher education and will be used for teachers to better understand how to close the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students. All schools across the country aim to close the achievement gap in order to meet the federal standards of 2001’s No Child Left Behind act.
“This is great news for Oregon students,” State Superintendent Susan Castillo said in a press release. “This grant allows us to continue our momentum towards building a system to track student progress and help our teachers improve instruction. This is critical in our work in closing the achievement gap.”
The grant will supplement the progress already made to create the student information database by helping create connections between early childhood data and data collected on through higher education. The data collected in the database will also be used for matching struggling students with appropriate teachers.
“We’ve been trying to track students for years to mark their progress,” education department spokesperson Susanne Smith said. “It’s really important when we’re trying to close the achievement gap between white students and disadvantaged students. (Disadvantaged students) have higher drop-out rates (and) do poorly. In order to know what they need academically, you have to know where they are in the system.”
Smith further explained that the database allows teachers to track how students do over a span of several grades and that it also ties pre-Kindergarten education on through higher education. Smith also said this database could potentially make applying for college easier when it comes to transcripts, because it would be accessed from a single database instead of the registrar’s office receiving one transcript at a time from schools, which Smith described as “time-consuming.”
“Right now, the system doesn’t talk to each other very well,” Smith said. “If we were all in one system, it would be seamless.”
Smith also noted that privacy would be held to high standards.
“Anytime you talk to students, you want to make sure that there is privacy and confidentiality,” she said. “This (grant) allows us to create a system that ensures that we’re protecting a student’s privacy and confidentiality.”
Oregon was one of 20 states to receive the grant. All 50 states and the District of Columbia, the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico applied for a grant from NCES. Funding for the NCES grant came from President Barack Obama’s $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. NCES awarded a total of $250 million to 20 states.
Oregon’s proposed student progress database is set to begin comprehensively tracking students in three years.
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