BC’s Ministry of Education and individual school districts have combined to spend more than $100 million for problem-plagued software that tracks personal student information.
The system’s provider, Pearson Education Inc., plans to stop servicing what it considers an “antiquated” application and has offered Education Minister George Abbott free licences and discounted services to migrate to what Pearson considers to be a superior system.
Abbott, meanwhile, is sitting on a $250,000 report that his ministry commissioned Gartner Inc. to produce to advise the government on how to proceed.
“I’ve requested to see the report. Abbott said that he would make it public once he gets it,” New Democratic Party (NDP) education critic Robin Austin told Business in Vancouver.
“Generally, when governments receive something like that and they don’t make it public as quickly as one would like, that suggests that there’s probably not good news in it.”
Abbott told the legislature in May that his ministry has spent $89.1 million on the British Columbia Enterprise Student Information System (BCESIS) since school boards started rolling out the software in 2005 to track such information as:
•student grades;
•attendance;
•allergies;
•native language;
•parent contact information; and
•other personal data.
That expense is in addition to what Austin estimates to be tens of millions of dollars that school boards have spent to train teachers to use the system and train computer administrators to troubleshoot its persistent problems.
Abbott also told the legislature that the public would not have to file a freedom-of-information request to see the report.
System failures
The biggest problem with BCESIS, according to critics, is that data for all school districts is stored on centralized servers in Vancouver.
B.C. teachers input data about the province’s 649,366 grade-school students at the same time of day and at the same time of year. That creates a logjam so severe that BCESIS kicks teachers off the system while they’re inputting data.
Teachers or school administrators then must try to log in again. If they’re successful, they have to start from scratch and re-enter all information.
A few school districts started using the system in 2005 and since then more school districts have migrated to BCESIS and abandoned the software they previously used to track student data.
Teacher frustration reached full boil last September when 130 independent schools and all but four of B.C.’s 60 school districts had adopted BCESIS. The volume exceeded the system’s capabilities.
Teachers fear that the situation will be as bad, if not worse, this year.
Abbott was unavailable to speak about BCESIS throughout the month of August, but his government was concerned enough about BCESIS problems to contract Gartner in early 2011 to produce a report advising it on whether to continue using the system and to educate officials on available options.
Ontario’s Administrative Assistant Ltd. (AAL), which developed BCESIS more than a decade ago, ran into financial problems during the economic meltdown.
Pearson bought AAL last November and was unimpressed enough with AAL’s enterprise student information system (ESIS) that Pearson tried immediately to get all ESIS clients, including the B.C. government, to shift to newer Pearson software.
“[We] presented them with an offer for free licences and discounted services to migrate from the antiquated ESIS to our go-forward solution, PowerSchool,” said spokesman Adam Gaber.
PowerSchool supports 10 million students in the U.S. and is a leading student-information system that Gaber believes is better technology with more robust features.
“We are in ongoing discussions with the [B.C. Ministry of Education] about the process of moving to a new student-information system and continue to advocate moving to PowerSchool as quickly as possible to support the ministry in their goals and serve the students, educators and their families with the information they need to power student achievement in the province.”
System options
North Vancouver software developer Bruce Allen said B.C. needs to move from BCESIS to what he calls a “distributed” system, where users no longer have to interact with servers stored in a single location.
Allen owns Harts Systems Ltd., a school-administration software development company. He believes that no amount of spending on BCESIS will eliminate its bugs.
His 12-employee company bid eight years ago to provide the ministry of education with database software when the government issued a request for proposals (RFP).
The government wanted the same new system for all school districts so it could eliminate duplication of work each time a student changed districts. The 2003 RFP stipulated a “centralized” system so that all information would be stored in one place, which Allen said is a ridiculous requirement.
“The reason they wanted to be centralized is so they would have this great big computer system,” Allen said.
“It’s the same reason that a 16-year-old wants a big Ford Mustang. There’s nothing intellectual about this. If you’ve got a big, powerful computer system, it’s a sign that you’re big and powerful.”
Allen worked for the B.C. government in the 1970s when his task was to put education ministry data onto a single computer.
“We were not capable of doing it because it can’t be done,” Allen said. “That’s demonstrated by the failure of BCESIS. It was a completely impractical solution to the problem.”
Larry Kuehn, the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation’s (BCTF) director of research and technology division, agrees.
He said the B.C. government’s options are:
•keep BCESIS and contract a business to maintain the system and fix bugs;
•keep BCESIS and hire workers in-house to maintain the system;
•buy a new system such as Pearson’s PowerSchool; or
•hire developers to create custom software for B.C.’s school system.
He predicted that Gartner consultants will recommend that the government adopt a system such as Pearson’s PowerSchool, which he said can handle only 70,000 students at a time.
Gaber could not confirm if Pearson would be able to modify PowerSchool to make it a distributed system capable of handling 650,000 students, as Kuehn wants.
“Creating a new system in-house is less preferable [than going with PowerSchool],” Kuehn said. “It’s just too expensive if you’re doing it on a one-off basis. When a company like Pearson builds their system, all the clients pay a part of it. When you make your own system, you pay the whole shot.”
System supporters
Sue Myers, who has been an administrator at various North Vancouver schools, is one of the few people BIV interviewed who applauded BCESIS and would be disappointed if the province migrates away from it.
She said BCESIS is better than previous software that the North Vancouver School District used.
“It makes it so much easier to get data about students who are transferred into the district. Parents or people in other school districts used to take weeks to send the information we need.”
Myers pointed out that BCESIS includes information on which people are authorized to pick students up after school, thereby boosting student safety.
She added that student photos are in the system, which makes it easier for substitute teachers and others to identify students.
The Ministry of Education is also able, in real time, to find out what trends are developing in areas ranging from allergies to native language.
The government can then allot more money to English as a second language (ESL) training in targeted areas or adopt safety-training sessions to protect students from likely dangers.
It can also track exam results across the province and across years to identify poor performance early and take steps to improve learning.
“Everything is at your fingertips,” Myers said.
“The BCTF is exaggerating about how many teachers get kicked off the system. I advise teachers to log in at 8:30 a.m. when they arrive instead of at 9 a.m. when kids come into the classroom. Then, they should have no problems.” •
