While school officials are satisfied with the Infinite Campus student information system, they are bringing another program on to help with performance assessments.
On June 29, the WW-P school board approved a one-year, $28,800 agreement with Performance Matters for its Performance Matters Accountability Edition program. According to Russell Lazovick, the assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction, the program can track SAT, Advanced Placement, and other student scores, and will also help teachers improve their instruction methods.
“When you get a report card, it gives you an overall grade, but as a teacher, as a practitioner, you want to know the details,” said Lazovick. “It allows us to put those kind of assessments into a system.”
The program allows teachers to measure trends and understand the strengths of any individual student, compared with another student who is at the same point in the curriculum. “If we start to look at students who are succeeding, teachers can have meaningful conversations about what’s going on in those classrooms,” Lazovick said.
Those conversations already take place in WW-P, but the process is more difficult. Currently, teachers can use programs like Microsoft Excel to make their own charts, but the new program pulls up the data and organizes and analyzes it automatically.
The Performance Matters system works with Infinite Campus in that it pulls student information to analyze. “We’re not moving everything into Performance Matters — just the pieces that will allow teachers to do their work.”
Once it was approved, officials began working on setting up the system, which typically takes 90 days. However, Lazovick said, “we’re looking to make sure we’re up and running for September.”
In 2008 the district launched the web-based Infinite Campus and has phased in access to parents, who can log in and access their children’s demographic information, attendance and immunization records, and progress reports and report cards.
