Gap Analyses

With the absence of an enterprise-wide system to connect all the dots, I mean, the data sets needed for full-state reporting & day-to-day data, one important task that is often not so straight-forward is a gap analysis.  Since the Student Information System (SIS) is the primary source for teachers, students, attendance, and sections data for everyday use by many, many critical systems such as:  nutrition, state assessment apps, data & test scores warehouse of some form, special ed, business & fiscal services, human resources, and so on - gap analyses are almost a daily task for many at the district office and school site levels.

In some cases, a gap analysis could be visualized as the image above.  Data is not aligned and need to be "scrubbed" to fit into the many different "buckets" so that it will sync with the other systems.  Being a trimester district, the transition from trimester to the next trimester could pose some challenges when dates overlap, by mistake.  The side-effects are passed on to each of the applications being updated nightly.

The many different timelines:  calendar year, fiscal year, school year, test year, state defined for data collections, and so on also require reviewing the data to meet the requirements.  If I put the data on a timeline, it would probably look like a train schedule with overlapping due and operational dates.

More to follow...

@adel3daywalker

Note:  The image is a section of the seawall at Torrey Pines State Reserve, La Jolla, CA - taken February 14, 2016.