Grades By Hand?

More than a couple of readers have commented that IMPACT has gotten swamped and that folks are having to do grades by hand -- is that citywide or just here and there, and is that's what's causing the delay in getting grades to kids?

Comments

IMPACT started running slow as early as Tuesday night... crawling on Wednesday during the day when the big load hit

I think the one thing that would improve IMPACT is not having people input data in realtime by interfacing with the server.

Our kids got a letter from Arne saying that report cards would be sent home next week. At 1:30 on Thursday we were told we were going to have to hand write report cards for Friday because IMPACT was down. Are they crazy?

I have all my grades on IMPACT, NOT on paper. So how am I to get the grades to create the late report cards I am to do? I guess I'll just pass all the kids. This is nuts.
In 25 years as a teacher, I have always been able to give my students their earned grade and report card during the last week of school. Who is respobsible for this screw-up?

George Schmidt is responsible for the problems with IMPACT

It is so disappointing to see how CPS is able to get away with this IMPACT garbage.
Search high and low and you will never find any critical commentary about it in the major newspapers or on the local TV stations. It is so obviously being swept under the rug.
Maybe the new Trib reporters should sniff around and talk to a few school based people.

Knowing all the screw ups with IMPACT our administration decided we should do paper report cards. Issuing transfers and seeing who could graduate 8th without summer school etc was problematic, but luckily we did paper report cards so the kids got them last week!

Somebody's cousin or brother-in-law must be the COE of the company that is implementing IMPACT. NO ONE, in their right mind would promote IMPACT unless there was some personal, financil gain involved. All we needed was a few updates to SI!!!

Lots of IT vets tried to tell runcie and the vendor that the kind of traffic generated at peak times like this doesn't lend itself to running everything live.

This is the reason the mainframe, which is much more stable, runs changes on many key data updates overnight in batch.

All runcie and co. cared about was not having to learn the mainframe, and not having to cope with data leaks from people who did know how to use it.

The big crime is not that front line staff is sitting for hours in front of monitors, or that peak usage jeopordizes data, but that even when or if they figure it out, it will be all but impossible to verify the veracity af any other student data FIOA request from hereon in.

I am not in the pro-SI camp. Don't get me wrong, IMPACT failed miserably. It completely bit. But there is a need for something. It's about time that we quite taking attendance by hand and doing stupid monthly summaries. It is about time there was some more validity to the attendance process. (You can't take attendance in SI.) I'm tired of getting cut slips and wondering who is processing them and who isn't. It's crazy that grammar schools are still entering grades by hand, that there is not automated system.
But I don't think this has to be an either/or proposition, does it? Is IMPACT the only system out there. Do other big cities handle stuff like this?

I'm not pro SI either.

However, there are plenty of custom and semi-custom interfaces that could have been built as a user friendly front end to the mainframe to replace SI, cobbled together to run on Mapper because the board was too cheap to buy or customize any software.

Perfect example of pay me now, or pay me later.

But then why did they spend all these $$$ on impact and it does not work? Why?

Does CPS realize that with this kind of software snafu, grades can be changed to protect the guilty?
Watch those passwords!

They are paying for all the years they did not support the system. A handful of industrious people put the system together by hand, and the bosses just kept piling on data entry demands of the schools and report requests of the IT department.

They could have been planning and gradually building and improving the system, but just like with school roofs and other infrastructure, they would wait until disaster struck before even planning for it.

The short response to why impact costs so much and does (and will do) so little is that so most of people are gone who requested the data and the reasons for them, and many of the people who built them were let go or encouraged (discouraged) to retire.

The board barely paid their salaries (most of them were on the lowest administrative step and stayed there their whole careers), and paid nothing for people to write the original specifications, documentation to accompany the reports, or any data maps substantially tracking what fields meant what. A couple of the most superprogrammers did it anyway (coming on the weekends on their own time), but most did not.

They've been playing catchup for over a decade, but always because they are convinced by consultants that a 'solution' can be rammed through in a year or two, tops.

This 'implementation' has been going on since at least 03, but all that time didn't even go into planning. The vendor slapped a label on a piece of ready made junk, and has spent more than two years putting lipstick on the pig to try to distract the customer that it does all it needed to do.

The only ones they convinced were the leaders, who had never used the system, and the young new hires (who couldn't learn the system AND had never used the system).

runcie has been bobble-heading since they pulled the trigger because this is what they hired him (and the people he in turn brought in) to do, and now he cannot admit that it is too little too late.

Witnesses and critics have been silenced and sanctioned, and now it is not even the people in the schools who will pay. Most would go through all of this if in the end you got better or more accesible information, and it got you more funding for schools; the ones who will pay are kids and their parents.

They beat the schools senseless about data-driven decision making and how it will turn schools around, and to a certain extent it is true, in that analyzing it helps you to identify, prioritize and spend on the primary problems first, but how will that ever happen if you don't have correct or properly analyzed data?

And that last post on passwords? Believe it. Go on Google and type in FBI computer system and the poster child, the road map on how impact should not have happened will roll out - the waste, the vendor lies, the unusability and yes, last year they discovered a government consultant had hacked in over two years previous and stolen over 38K passwords.

The best wrapup of that boondoggle (170 million and they just started over again) is Washington Post expose at -
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/17/AR2006081701485_pf.html

Read it and tremble.

[yellowdart]

My favorite part about IMPACT is that because the company is Canadian - and the backend of the software is not fully customizable - the addresses are done in Canadian format. For example, 2000 N. Sheridan comes out as 2000 Sheridan N. Of course I'm certain the US postal service won't be confused at all...

FYI - the reason the school names are listed with first names first is that IMPACT only allows one name per school to be entered into the system. Therefore, if you want the school name to appear in full on any report then it has to be entered into the system that way, and that's how it will appear in every school name field.

CPS desperately needs a new system for tracking student information - it's criminal to use paper and pencil in this age. It's also a damn shame that CPS managed to waste such huge amounts of money on a system which doesn't meet our needs.

Be careful about those school names. It may have someone call you a lazy chicken little.... Interesting to know. I suppose since there are 2 Kings, 2 Browns, 2 DooLittles, a few Carvers, this is how it must be done... Ahh IMPACT.

While we're at it with CPS wasting money, PeopleSoft is still making payroll errors....

Ain't life grand?

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. These two systems seem more broke than the previous systems. I'll admit, I was wowed by not having to do my green book anymore, but I ended up having to do it anyway since IMPACT was down nearly everyday in the last two weeks.

[George Schmidt]

"...George Schmidt is responsible for the problems with IMPACT..."

True. All too true. My confession follows...

First, we created bad karma.

Instead of Happy Talk and Smile Faces, I put a picture of Runcie in the June Substance (page 11) noting Runcie's $165,000 annual salary and the following: "At the January 24 [2007] meeting of the Chicago Board of Education, Runcie presented the Board with a dramtic Power Point on the virtues of IMPACT. Trouble was, the program, like the recently revised payroll software, doesn't do what it has to do..."

The Karmic thunder waited until May and June, then...

The gods of corporate school reform frowned because of the bad vibes I'd caused, and look what happened next.

The Chicago Board of Education will meet this Wednesday (June 27, 2007) at the usual time and place. (They haven't dared to meet in a school or other accessible place since launching the 2002 "Renaissance", then its encore, "Renaissance 2010").

Wanna bet Robert Runcie's still sitting back by the EXIT door (next to where David Vitale used to sit) at Wednesday's Board of Education meeting?

Wanna also bet that nobody on the Board has heard that there were massive problems with IMPACT and People Soft (after the Board spent more than a half billion dollars on the projects, counting in all those no-bid subcontracts)?

Wanna also bet that none of those payroll problems happened to any of those people in the sky box seats (the $100,000-and-up club) at the Board meetings?

There are a lot of perks being in the $100,000 Club at this point. The People Soft and HR cuts debacles might have hit them, but...

...They were already immune from the impact of the IMPACT goffiness because most of them never taught, never had to make out grades, and haven't even been required to hold an Illinois teaching certificate -- starting with Arne Duncan himself...

Besides, who needs grades when we have "data driven management" under which the ISAT, Prairie State and ACT are all that matters? (Just ask retired CPS administrator John Easton...).

Even if People Soft hiccuped when it got to their names, does coming up short hundreds of dollars when the mortgage is due matter if you've got that cool bonus check in the bank to keep your paycheck company?

They think they know the pain of the employees, but they don't.

[1.04]

Impact

I am guilty of being a grumpy old man, a caustic cynic of the Board, and a frequent
visitor to this site. So for what it is worth I thing Impact could work!
The concept of a windows based system is sound. The training last week was excellent.
The part I learned, SI, was easy. I think as we go forward most of us will learn to use
Impact.
Having said that the real problems will be in the schools. Every teacher will have to have access to a modern computer in their room! Attendance must be entered every period of every day. That is going to be the rub. I can see real trouble when several teachers try to use the same working computer at the same time.

[1.04]

Sorry

Being a High school Teacher I do not know how grammar school teachers take attendance. I do not think they call the roll every period. So if I left the impression
Teachers will have to enter attendance every period that is not accurate. Every
Teacher will use Impact but each circumstance will be different

1:04, when I went to the "Ice Cream Social" at 125 last year to show Central Office people how the new system worked, or rather to show propaganda on how it worked, one of the first questions I asked was, 'how will each teacher be able to enter and see their student information if you haven't given any grammar school teachers any computers, and you haven't given any to high school teachers hired in the last three years?'

The IT mope in charge of the dog and pony show immediately drew herself up and haughtily said, 'each school is responsible for providing what equipment they need to access the system'.

I honestly think they're hoping schools will not be able to afford to get enough machines for peak usage, just to give them time to fix all the problems that have already been popping up or slowing the system to a crawl - which can cause the system to crash, which is why software systems that aren't merely a front end to a mainframe are a dumb idea for large accounting systems.

Flight scheduling at the airport, ATMs, insurance companies, bank systems, all keep their information on mainframes, not in software databases.

p.s. - not kidding about the Ice Cream Social; ask me about the time they ordered us to gather and stand in the elevator lobbies of each floor, so they could give us each a cookie - this was like two days after they told us they were freezing our paychecks, which had already been cut 2% the year before....

[1.04]

Potential

Dear I

Well I only went to training. As you say the equipment must be there. From what I
Saw it seemed ok, however when thousands of teachers hit it at the same time it
Will probably be a different story.
We were told that Impact would use parts of Verify, which we were on all year.
I personally dismiss all the silly talk about eliminating our Green Books which
Proponents of this system claim. Back in September 06 a person showed us Verify
And said throw away the Green books. I asked him what will happen if our records
Are needed for a court case. Five years after I taught a girl that happened to me. He
Didn’t have an answer. Remember those records are legal documents. I will
Always keep a copy

At a school where there are no security camaeras, someone cut the wireless line. So no one got to take attendance, except on paper. Where is the IG on this contract--really, it needs the Illinois IG!

[Jody Tarbuckle]

I actually like IMPACT. They have a lot of information about my children that I had to ask for (but never got). In addition, in CIM they have lots of test data on my children which helps me analyze data and differentiate my instruction. Sorry to be in the minority. Our Principal did a very good job of training us and getting us access in different parts of the building i.e. teacher's lounge, main office to work on IMPACT in case we couldn't get to a computer. I am just so glad I don't have to deal with those green books and all those funny little marks.

[Ron]

I could not see the advantage to IMPACT and have attended the training class. If it could replace both Verify and SI, that would be one thing, but it can not. We will be keeping Verify for the forseeable future because there are features on Verify that IMPACT is not capable of providing. Did anyone hear that IMPACT was being sued by some other districts (Houston or Dallas was one)? I can't figure out why we're bringing this in. I also can't figure out why we're switching our email system to First Class.