LANSING – Within two years, all of the schools in the state will be connected with a dedicated network as part of the Technology Readiness Infrastructure Grants, the State Board of Education was told Tuesday.
The grants, $41.5 million for the current fiscal year and $50 million each of the prior two years, were designed to allow schools across the state prepare for coming computer adaptive testing.
Most of the schools themselves were ready for the change, but districts and intermediate districts were not, Linda Forward, director of the Office of Education Improvement and Innovation, told the board.
A survey in December showed 86 percent of schools had the computers they would need and 84 percent had the network capacity within their building to handle the tests, but only 57 percent of districts had the network capacity between buildings needed, Forward said.
“Districts need broadband capacity,” she said.
The solution to that, she said, is the State Education Network. Within six months, the network will connect all 53 ISDs and within two years will connect all school buildings, she said.
The network will not only ensure schools the bandwidth they need, but will also provide some added security by separating school traffic from the rest of the Internet, officials said.
“The hardest part has been to find where don’t we have a piece of cable run,” Forward said. “We had to map that across the state. … Now we have shovels in the ground filling those gaps.”
The money has also provided improvements within schools, Forward said. Instead of providing grants to individual schools, though, the grants were spread to five consortia around the state that, in turn, have provided schools with funds for upgrades. Every district that requested it got up to $10 per student for those upgrades.
It was unclear Tuesday, though, how much improvement the next survey of school technology, due out in December, would show. While schools have been purchasing new equipment, Forward said many of the machines counted as test ready on the prior survey would not count on the new survey because they use Windows XP, for which Microsoft has ended support.
Deputy Superintendent Joseph Martineau said the tests planned for spring would run on Windows XP, but that discussions were underway whether future administrations would require a newer operating system.
Flanagan said the new tests are still under development, but would be ready to administer in the spring. And Mr. Martineau said the contractor hired to oversee the testing would have the resources to ensure there are few issues.
“We have people ready to scale up on a moment’s notice,” Martineau said. “So we’re very comfortable that we will have the bandwidth, we will have the scalability, we will have the help desk support.”
Other states that have tried online testing have seen failures related to capacity, he said. The contract for the coming test requires that the company be prepared for testing to be spread out over the three-week window or all done on the last day. “That’s not going to happen, but …” he said.
The test also has a paper option for schools not ready. Officials said 38 districts so far had approached the state about using that option for at least some of their schools.
Martineau said he was still working with some districts where the issue might be more mental than technological preparedness. “There’s a misconception in the field that paper and pencil will be easier for the kids,” he said. While he said the students need to be familiar with using the keyboard and mouse, he said the questions can actually be better tuned to the child’s skill level online than with paper.
Board members briefly discussed concerns over using the state test scores as part of coming teacher and administrator evaluations, given the current state of flux for those tests, but agreed to move the issue to a future meeting to give it a more thorough airing.
Funds are also being used to train teachers how to use technology. The state has already provided training for 1,673 teachers, and Forward said the goal is to expand that to 10,000 annually.
Forward noted that the funds through the TRIG program would not be enough to provide all of the training needed.
Superintendent of Public Instruction Mike Flanagan said the longer term hope is to not have to continue the training. “Our hope is that the teacher prep institutions with teachers in the pipeline are thinking about these things,” he said. “That way we don’t have to play catchup all the time.”
While the universities in the state are autonomous, Flanagan said governors looking to appoint members to their governing boards should look for candidates who are open to such collaboration with state agencies and between universities.
Among the pieces of the project is new student data systems, Forward said. Once final details are in place, each of the five consortia will have its own system that all schools within its bounds will use, but the five systems will also talk to each other.
Among the details not yet resolved is how student data will actually be shared, Forward and others said. They were not, for instance, able to answer whether a school receiving a new student would have to request that student’s files or whether the old school would automatically provide those files.
