Question Of The Week: How About Those Progress Reports?

By now, in theory at least, everyone's schedules and class rosters should be settling out, hiring should be almost done, and the real business of schools should be well underway.  That's why this week teachers have to submit progress reports that will give parents and kids a sense of how the school year is going so far. So, how is it going?  [UPDATE:  Lots of good comments, but this one from Crane HS might be the best.]

Comments

[Kugler]

Too many absences and not enough instructional time. After this month it is over for the year, until february, because of all the holidays and broken weeks coming up.

The incessant whining and complaining about putting grades in Impact is really getting on my nerves. "It's too hard" "I have to click too may times" I'm sick of so many teachers, many veterans, who are so incompetent when it comes to computers. Its 2007 - computers are here to stay. Impact is actually a pretty easy system to use if you have half a brain capable of understanding basic computer skills kids in pre-K programs have already mastered.

[George Schmidt]

Hey, 1:19 PM, thanks for the contribution to the discussion of IMPACT and pending five-week grades.

HMMMMM... We all love it when you talk dirty. Especially when you're logged on as aonymous.

You got a real name in the real world, or maybe an 888 phone number...

Or just your porn star name?

1:19,

A program like IMPACT is absolutely the way to go for handling CPS student data. But the current grading portion - which I agree is very simple - is also inefficient and not especially intuitive. Sure, it's not *hard*. But it does take far longer than need be. Navigating back and forth from page to page and waiting for pages to load and reload etc. isn't necessary.

My complaints are these: 1) Teachers should be able to use keystrokes to navigate through grading report pages. 2) Teachers should be able to use keystrokes to enter grades. 3) Teachers should be able to use key strokes to assign comments. 4) Teachers should be able to mass assign grades. 5) Teachers should be able to mass assign comments.

With some simple coding all of these issues could be addressed. 4) and 5) may be possible right now, but I've yet to see it done. I don't have trouble with the current system and don't really understand why some can't figure it out. But grade entry user interface it is way below par.

For such expensive software, the interface should be far superior to what it is. Complaining and whining? Maybe. (I'm a big supporter of this type of technology - it should be a huge money saver and time saver.) But there's really no excuse for such a poor interface and broader poor implementation of the software.

The only real questions I have are these: Why is the interface and implementation so bad? And what is being done to fix it and improve it? It's a big project and we need to be patient, but there needs to be progress sooner rather than later.

[119]

119
You are an ass. I am a computer expert IMPACT sucks you are just a downtown clown. You put grades in using impact then tell me what you think.

I could have made a better grading program and attendance data base using excel and access. CPS got ripped off. Maybe you made a little on the side?

Where you the receiver or the giver?

Amen 4:10

[Kugler]

Can we all get along?

The best part is that you would think that for the kind of money they pay and continue to bleed, that this ::was:: a custom build product that could be tweaked, as you say to perform without endless keystrokes and clicking to menu pages that contain only ONE item (could we click straight to the item, you think??).

Those who say it's only a couple extra clicks were only required to create a roster with three fake names for the beta version (since they never got it to run properly live and didn't bother to build what real programmers would call a test environment), but have to populate hundreds of thousands of grade records week after week, semester after semester, etc. etc.

In between -ahem- teaching children.
Live, not in test environment.

They took a generic piece of crap off the shelf (a shelf in Canada, no less) and slapped a label and a big price tag on it. For the scamsters that hatched this harebrained scheme, it was the equivalent of buying a case of water for 4 bucks at Walgreens and then hawking the bottles for $2 apiece on the off-ramp on a hot day.

They could charge further exhorbitant amounts for 'customization'. The opportunities for fraud were endless once they had our data by the short hairs.

As I've continued to maintain, lots of good people no longer at OTS tried to tell them this, and even enterprising young contractors felt they could and were willing to rewrite some of the code to make the interfaces cleaner.

That's why you stare at a huge empty screen with tiny data fields crammed in the corners.

That's how it came out of the box.

The only thing changed by the endless rafts of middlemen Runcie hired was the price tag.

OOps and AMEN TO 7:50

THEN THE FOOLS TURN OFF THE BACK-UP SYSTEMS THAT WORKED (SI AND VERYIFY)
DAAAAh

Hey 50% of my students don't even show up on my IMPACT yet.

Just think you only have to do half your progress reports.

Send the parents of kids with AWOL records downtown to get their progress reports from Arne and Runcie!

YEAH!!

[Kugler]

Lest we forget the less than 30 left of email!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Here is a nice tidbit(Imagine 60MB):

More Mailbox Space for Principals and AIOs

Information & Technology Services (ITS) has recognized the need for additional space in principals’ and Area Instruction Officers’ CPSMail e-mail boxes. As of September 4, 2007, the mailbox capacity for these individuals was increased from 60 MB to 400 MB.

Because of this significant increase in capacity for over 700 users, principals and AIOs should not allow their mailboxes to reach the maximum size of 400 MB. To assist principals and AIOs with this, the following warnings will be sent out when they reach the new limit:

* When a principal or AIO mailbox reaches 350 MB, that individual will receive a warning that he/she is approaching capacity.

* When a principal or AIO mailbox reaches 400 MB, that individual will not be able to send e-mails.

* When a principal or AIO mailbox reaches 500 MB, that individual will not be able to send or receive e-mails.

By properly managing their mailboxes, principals and AIOs can avoid reaching the above thresholds. Please direct questions about the e-mail system or your mailbox size to the 3-EXCL Service Desk at (773) 553-3925. The Service Desk can help you manage the size of your mailbox and help you figure out how to archive your mail.

Clownism at its best! :-0

Kugler,

Your blurb on mailbox space for principals reminds me of the bragging CPS did a few years ago when I was first hired about how they were on the front edge of the digital curve because they had accumulated 2 terabytes of storage...for 30,000+ employees. At the time, storage capacity on my school network maxed out at 50MB, which, of course, I filled up in the first hour or so on the job.

2 terabytes of storage. Tens of thousands of employees. And boy were they proud! Of course, as we all know, any mid-level or even minor league geek has that much storage at home for individual use.

Ah, those were the days of yore - 2004-2005 - how I miss you! So just remember, it could be worse. (I wonder where our FirstClass document storage maxes out these days.)

Oh yeah, and IMPACT is pathetic. They should have given my brother the contract. He could've coded it from scratch for half the price, hired me as a lackey, and we both could have retired to ocean front mansions by now. Oh well, only 31 more years to go.

[Kugler]

I got only 26 years to go!

[George Schmidt]

HOW DID CPS AGREE TO BETA TEST A MASSIVE SOFTWARE SYSTEM IN REAL TIME?

The only thing I disagree with 8:07 about (quote following) is that there was a "Beta" version of this mess prior to this school year. Sounds from everything the world is hearing that we're in the middle of the Beta testing.

"Those who say it's only a couple extra clicks were only required to create a roster with three fake names for the beta version (since they never got it to run properly live and didn't bother to build what real programmers would call a test environment), but have to populate hundreds of thousands of grade records week after week, semester after semester, etc. etc. ...In between -ahem- teaching children... Live, not in test environment." (8:07).

A little about Beta testing in schools (personal experience, which shouldn't have changed if the contracts dealt with real schools in real time and were awarded after due dilligence by competent and experienced professionals...

Back in the late 1980s, we hustled computers (Gifted and other funding; also private sector). At Amundsen High School, we had the first "Macintosh Computer Classroom". I was the teacher. Apple Computer then featured us in several promotionals to schools. (These were little booklets about computers in classrooms, in the days before CDs and You Tube).

We also did some trade shows. All of it was approved by CPS, all of the kids (now very accomplished professional adults), and in cooperaton with the old IT people (Clifford Cox) sat Pershing Road.

Here is how it is relevant to IMPACT 20 years later:

Beta testing was very time consuming detail work, and it was very much appropriate to do it carefully in selected real time classrooms across the city.

Carefully and in test conditions that were close to reality -- such as a full program with kids every day, which I always had in those years (1984, when we got our first Mac Plus, to 1993, when Ed Klunk purged me from the school and I went to Bowen, where we set up the same kind of thing, with four classrooms and some change...).

And the best place to do such Beta work was in general high schools, not in some hothouse air conditioned room at 1819 W. Pershing Road. But in those days (before we got "reformed" and "free marketed" and privatizationed), the people at Pershing Road also knew that. (For those who remember: How do you spell "Spitz"?)

Back to real time Beta testing.

During that time we were working directly with IT and Apple (and some other software developers; remember, in OS Apple was always a software company as well as other things, long before the iPod and suchlike), we were asked to Beta test a major revision of the Mac OS.

In exchange we got more hardware and software, which, as you know, has to be constantly upgraded or classrooms. (Those were the days of the Mac Plus with an external hard drive and the SE, which then got souped up as far as the old box could handle).

That Beta testing lasted more than a year, and the system we worked on was fairly stable when we got it.

I had it on a couple of machines that were used by the "best" kids. Generally, remember this is real classroom use, at least five classes per day. Even then we had to segregate the systems we were using the Beta on. And keep careful careful careful records and logs. And communicate what we were finding.

With both IMPACT and the People Soft payroll systems, Arne's combination of arrogance, ignorance, vapid zealotry, deregulation and privatization has give us system wide Beta testing in real time in mission critical contexts (plural).

Nobody in their right minds in the much vaunted "private sector" would have approved that.

Everything that's being described here indicates that this is a Beta program.

Talk about insanity.

And how about that rendering of addresses. The address thing, which even a Sun-Times pundit can "get", apparently hasn't come up/down yet in real time with 41 cents worth of postage riding on each of more than 400,000 pieces of mail.

So now I (and a million other people) live on "West" St or Ave. Or Ber West. And those on Pulaski live on North Ave. (as on Pul North). My mail isn't usually delivered to 5132 Berteau West, and I hope we can straighten that out before I'm supposed to get mail about my child's work at the local elementary school. Was it too much to ask to render addresses the way we do in the USA? Did someone think they were "saving" a few bucks because of the value of the Looney vis a vis the Dollar?

Only the Daily Show can do justice to both of these debacles. What's equally amazing is the cover up from Catalyst all the way to those bigger voices of corporate "school reform" and apologetics for the "miracle" and Daley's "miracle management" at the Tribune. If this system had been installed to manage Tribune home delivery, audited circulation would be halved in a month. But it's OK because its CPS, their pet market driven "miracle" show...

This isn't funny from the semi-outside (I'm mostly right now a parent, taxpayer, and reporter about CPS, thanks to Arne's blacklist) and it has to be driving people with options out of teaching (and principaling?) right now after the fifth weekend of fixing problems that shouldn't exist in the first place at 600 sites or more.

Someone should be fired. Actually, several someones.

Starting with Duncan and Runcie.

And the Board of Education should resign.

But as long as I'm the only reporter in town covering these kinds of multi-million dollar debacles in detail (and in a historical context), we'll get instead imbecilities like Kate Grossman's musing on Chicago Week in Review about whether it was your "cultural insensitivity" that caused that kid to throw a desk at your head.

What a town!

[icouldusethe$]

I realize I'm off subject, but does anybody know if the 4% increase will be on our checks on Friday?

From IMPACT: · This grading script cleared out all existing scheduling for the Subjects listed below. Schools will now need to redo any scheduling for these subjects, such as departmentalization and assigning ancillary staff that differs from the values below.
· This grading script only configured the below subjects for grading. As a result, any additional Subjects offered by a school — such as Spanish or Band — will still need to be identified and manually configured for grading.

Unfortunately, this process was necessary in order to ensure that ES Report Cards/Progress Reports were correctly configured. The IMPACT Team understands that you have been working hard to configure the system to meet your school’s needs. We apologize profusely for the inconvenience this may cause your school and your staff.

Wow! Thanks IMPACT team--we had to do it all, all over again. Why don't you come to the schools and do this? That question, I bet, shocks you. Grade Quick was better. Will attendance be accurate? Why did you not just leave us alone?

A computerized grading and attendance program makes total sense. The problem is that Impace was incredibly poorly designed. Last year, it screwed up report cards and messed up attendance if two students in the same class had the same last name. The comments for progress reports are a joke and the progress reports are basically the same as report cards now. There are too many grades that are ambiguous and arbitrary now because there just hasn't been enough time to assess some of these subcategories that have never been on progress reports in the past. Computers aren't the problem. Impact is.

[John Silva]

You actually can use keystrokes for some of the grading in IMPACT. My issue with grades is that our Week 5 exams are next week because of PLAN/EXPLORE testing.

When the grade roster comes up, click on the drop-down menu for the first student and click on the grade. Then hit ENTER and it'll drop down to the next menu and all you have to do is type the letter, hit ENTER again and it'll drop down to the next student.

As for the rest of it, sure it's annoying but it's what we have to deal with right now. I too am a little tired of all the complaining about IMPACT. I think overall its a decent system. I actually haven't had more than trivial problems with it. When you put any new program into the field there's going to be kinks and bugs. No software is perfect.

The complaints are legitmate. The powers that be need to be aware that they have paid for a system that needs to be tossed in the garbage and heads should roll. How many schools are attempting to put in progress reports this morning? This makes no sense. It has taken an entire period, which normally should not take more than 15 minutes. Give me a break. The server is busy and kicks you off because everyone is trying to get on. Don't even try to put in comments. A new system is fine but give us something that is efficient and works!!!!!

Its 10;56 and I still have not been able to enter attendance today. The server is busy because everybody is enterring their progress reports.

Everybody needs to email Impact with your complaints NOW!!!!

I got halfway through my class's grades with comments when it crashed. An 8th grade teacher can't enter his grades because it gives him an error message that he can't enter grades for students not in his class. He didn't find that out of course until he wasted an hour and a half working at it.