In New York city's public school system, the largest in the nation, four out of 10 students don't graduate on time. Last week, school officials signed a five-year, $80 million deal with IBM to develop a business intelligence system that can track and analyze performance by student and by school, to help spot problem areas. Whether it will result in better education--or just more finger-pointing and recriminations--remains to be seen.

The Achievement Reporting and Innovation System will use IBM's WebSphere DataStage software to integrate structured and unstructured data from various systems. IBM's DataQuality software will standardize identifying information, such as names and addresses, and data will be consolidated in a data warehouse.

The system promises to measure student performance by teacher and school Photo by Richard B. Levine

ARIS will give parents access to exam results and school-administered assessments. Teachers will be able to analyze data by grade, school, classroom, and student, and create graphics that provide color-coded views of specific problem areas for each student, identified by tests and assessments. IBM's OmniFind software will provide search capabilities and offer teachers links to relevant information, such as an article on teaching fourth grade math; OmniFind will be limited to ARIS initially, but the plan is to open it to the Web and outside educational systems. Teachers also will use the Lotus Connections suite of social networking tools to collaborate through wikis and blogs.

Teachers and principals will be able to identify performance trends against factors such as where students live, teachers they've had in the past, and what schools they came from. Principals must take more than 20 hours of training to introduce the program to their schools, says Jim Liebman, the school system's chief accountability officer, and teachers will spend considerable time learning to analyze data.

The ARIS project is part of Children First, an overhaul of the New York City school system launched in 2003 by Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to comply with and even go beyond President Bush's No Child Left Behind law, which was intended to force accountability in the education system. Bloomberg appointed Klein, a former U.S. assistant attorney general who prosecuted the Department of Justice's antitrust case against Microsoft, to the chancellor job in 2002.

Children First gives the school district the power to change leadership or even close schools in cases of the most severe performance problems. Beginning this fall, schools will be assessed letter grades based on several factors, including student progress, and a number score from an outside evaluator who looks at, among other things, how student data is managed. The ARIS system, managed by Liebman, will provide information for both of these processes.

BIG HELP, OR BIG WASTE?

The deal, already controversial in New York, likely will face more scrutiny as details are revealed. IBM says ARIS will be a highly secure system, but some parents may voice concerns about a Big Brother approach to tracking the performance of more than 1 million students. And some parties feel the money could be put to better use. "You can lower a lot of class sizes with that money--or buy a lot of supplies," Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, which represents New York City's approximately 90,000 public educators, said in a statement.

No Child Left Behind has prompted many school districts to use technology to better manage data. Liebman says New York administrators toured numerous cities that have such projects under way, including Chicago and Philadelphia.

Politics aside, business intelligence technology will let New York parents track their children's educational progress and help teachers and administrators identify and address problems. If it makes even a modest dent in graduation rates, it's money well spent.