Corey Murray reports that Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) officials have built their own decision support tool.
It helps educators analyze the performance of schools, subgroups, and individual students. These results allow educators to tailor their instruction to ensure that all students succeed under the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).
District officials have patented the technology and now sell it to other school systems to offset the costs of its development.
First, congratulations for developing a tool that works for your district.
Second, I wonder if this patenting is another form of government competition with independent software developers, just an extension of what state universities have done routinely for decades?
It seem the IT is taking resources from the class-rooms. Teacher time in producing reports for education adminstrators takes teacher resource (time) “to teach” children. Not just teaching SOLs but teaching…We need to reduce administrators and get schools first and prioritize “line of product” resource, teachers time to teach.
Yes, it can appear that IT takes resources from teachers’ discretionary use in classrooms. Thanks for your comment. In addition to your idea, it also appears that IT adds unique access to more information on any student’s demand schedule than any aggregate of teachers can provide. That leaves teachers and administrators in a difficult situation of having to decide whether or not to help students with IT to reach beyond their the best that teachers alone can offer in classrooms. I urge support for more, selected, lower cost IT to encourage students and teachers to reach beyond traditional “teaching” to more independent learning.