TX has left CCSSO

(From EdWeek)

Texas has withdrawn from the Council of Chief State School Officers, an influential Washington organization that is helping lead the push to create common academic standards across states, among its other efforts.
The state's commissioner of education, Robert Scott, made the decision to pull out of the CCSSO, citing concerns about philosophical differences with the organization, as well as worries about membership costs, a spokeswoman for the Texas Education Agency said.
The commissioner felt that "our values don't align with each other" on education policy, said Suzanne Marchman, a spokeswoman for the agency. "We didn't see a return on investment from participating in the organization."
As a result of its decision, Texas will be the only state in the country that is not a CCSSO member, officials with the organization confirmed. CCSSO said it will no longer receive $60,000 in annual dues from the organization.
Forty-five states, plus the District of Columbia, have adopted the common-standards, which are meant to provide a clear and consistent set of academic expectations for students around the country regardless of where they live. Currently, the expectations for what students should know by the time they reach certain grades vary greatly across states, as do the tests and textbooks used in the states.
CCSSO, and the National Governors Association, in Washington, spearheaded the standards effort. The two organizations convened panels of experts to write the standards and circulated them among the states for review and revision.
But Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican who has said he is considering running for president, has been a strong critic of the common-standards movement, which he has argued is an attempt to create a national curriculum.
Marchman said that the decision to withdraw from the CCSSO was Scott's, not Perry's. Scott was appointed by Perry as commissioner of education in 2007 and reappointed to a four-year term in 2011.
In a letter to the CCSSO, Scott voiced strong objections to the organization's work on common standards.
"[P]lease know that your organization's advocacy for national standards and national tests is not in the best interest of the state of Texas and in my opinion, the nation," Scott wrote on June 14.
CCSSO describes its standards work as a state-led effort, not one designed to create national standards. But Scott said despite CCSSO's arguments that it has considered the needs of individual states during that process, its "actions in concert with other Washington, D.C.-based interest groups and the U.S. Department of Education demonstrate otherwise."
"It never was and still is not in the best interest of Texas to be coerced into replacing its transparent standards-adoption process and highly evolved assessment system" Scott wrote, with a process "developed largely in secret through a process led by special-interest groups who are not elected and who lack any public accountability."
Perry has sounded similiar arguments, contending that the federal government is playing too strong a role in the standards process. The Obama administration supports the states' common standards efforts, and has provided federal money to pay for states' development of common tests to align with the academic expectations.
CCSSO is a nonpartisan membership organization that seeks to bring together top state education leaders around the country to improve schools. The organization works in many areas of school policy, not just common standards, and it also seeks to represent state leaders on important education issues before Congress.
"We regret that Texas has decided to withdraw from the work of the council and recognize that is their responsibility to make decisions based on what is best for children in Texas," said Gene Wilhoit, CCSSO's executive director, in a statement. "States are leading critical reform efforts across the country to improve education for every student, and CCSSO remains focused on supporting this ongoing work."
Texas is struggling to close a major budget shortfall, which factored in the state's decision, Marchman said. Lawmakers in the state are expected to make significant cuts to the state's K-12 budget, which could result in the loss of thousands of school jobs, education advocates say.
Texas' move to pull out of CCSSO is not unprecedented. In 1995, Georgia's Republican state schools chief, Linda Schrenko, and Pennsylvania schools chief Eugene Hickok, who later served in George W. Bush's administration, announced that their states would not renew membership in the organization, after objecting to a stance CCSSO had taken on federal policy. The CCSSO had lobbied against cuts to federal education favored by congressional Republicans.
And in 1999, Colorado's education commissioner said his state would not take part in CCSSO, because the organization's positions ran counter to those of state elected officials. He cited CCSSO's objections to a Republican plan to give states more flexibility in using federal education money, and the group's support of then-President Clinton's efforts to raise teacher-certification requirements.
But those states have since rejoined the organization, CCSSO spokeswoman Kate Dando said, making Texas the only non-participant.
Photo: Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott in 2009 (Harry Cabluck/AP)

Mapping Update and Links to Artifacts

CCSSO State Core Model
June, 2011, Status

(All underlined links below download artifacts)

May 2011 State Core Slides

The State Core Model was chartered by Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) in 2009 to bring a coherent state education agency (SEA) perspective to national standards movements. The State Core Model v1.0 was published March 3, 2010 as part of the National Education Data Model (NEDM). To produce this version:

· 34 state data handbooks were mapped: AR, CO, CT, DE, FL, GA, IA, IL, KS, LA, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, MT, NC, NH, NJ, NM, NV, NY, OH, OK, PA, SC, TN, TX, UT, VT, WA, WI, WV, and WY.

· 20 states were met with: AR, CO, CT, DE, IA, KS, MD, ME, MT, NC, NJ, NM, NY, OK, PA, TX, UT, VT, WA, WY.

· 3 states were mapped more deeply: NJ, IL, and WA

In the first phase of work, as part of the National Education Data Model (NEDM), state mapping involved 4-5 hours of research per state with publicly published materials. The meetings were single, 1-hour WebEx sessions. Deep mapping involved development of comprehensive metadata workbooks. This phase also involved mapping to 79 EDFacts file specifications.

In May 2010, as part of the Common Education Data Standards (CEDS) adoption work, with funding from the Gates Foundation, CCSSO began expanding the State Core Model to serve a common technical reference model for SEAs and to help guide development of their P-20 State Longitudinal Data System (SLDS).

The State Core Model v2.0 was completed on December 1, 2010. v2o of the Model includes early childhood (EC), elementary and secondary (K12), post-secondary (PS), and workforce (WF) elements, known collectively as “P20,” and establishes comparability between sectors and between states. V2.0 of the Model includes maps to 625 Federal data collections and is designed to support dropout early warning intervention systems (DEWIS), positive behavior intervention systems (PBIS) and response to intervention (RTI). Future versions of the model are expected to include health and human services, justice, and substantially more depth in the areas of post-secondary education, interactive learning, performance metrics, and research. v2o of the Model consists of three principle artifacts:

(1) PDF and Word formats of a document entitled “State Core Model,” providing a narrative explanation of the context, conceptual model, and the logical model broken out by “data domains.”

(2) An Excel 2007 file entitled “State Core Workbook,” containing a complete data dictionary of all three schemas used in the model with maps to 625 federal collections and participating state dictionaries.

(3) The "ODS Entity Relationship Model," can be downloaded as a data definition language (DDL) scripts that will operate in over 30 major relational database platforms including Microsoft SQL 2008, MySQL, Oracle 10i.

ODS ERD in PDF
ODS ERD DDL in SQL’08
ODS ERD DDL in MySQL
ODS ERD DDL in Oracle

In February, 2011, the CEDS Management group approved a definition of consortium core artifacts that separated the State Core SLDS Reference Model (aka “the Model”) from the CEDS Data Mapping Workbook v2.1 (aka “the Workbook”) enabling the Model to continue to build out technical reference materials tightly focused on the needs of SEA SLDSs and freeing up the Workbook to create a Unified Data Map between the Model, CEDS Elements, NEDM, SIF, PESC, federal collections, and SLDSs. To guide this work, the CEDS Data Mapping Protocols documents a step-by-step process for states, specification bodies, and other data sets to be mapped in the Workbook and review the Model:

Data Mapping Steps
Step 1: Contact
Step 2: Discovery
Step 3: Mapping
Step 4: Mapping Review (Iterative)
Step 5: Map and Gap
Step 6: Final Presentation

State Core Model Review Steps
Step 7: Set-up Specific Instance in Sandbox
Step 8: Register for Friday technical reviews
Step 9: Customize State Core ODS
Step 10: Download DDL

So far, in the second phase of the work, as part of CEDS, 16 states have begun adoption through these ten steps: AZ, AR, CA, IA, IL, KS, MI, NC, ND, NJ, RI, OR, UT, WA, WY, VA.

Call for Guest Speakers and Topics of Interest

Our goal is to make the State Core Model as useful for you as possible, and our weekly technical review calls are no exception. Please let us know what topics you would like to discuss -- we'll look for your thoughts in the comments below.

Also let us know if you would like to be a featured guest on one of our calls, and we will work with you to plan your topic. Note that sharing your experience is a great way for you to help move the conversation forward -- you can help other states learn from your experience, and you can have the floor to ask questions of other states. Past speakers have been very well received. If you'd like to be a featured speaker, leave a comment below or email aseibel@pcgus.com.

Meta Mapping

The need to store the State Core data dictionary and correlate it to each of the State’s data models as well as mapping Education based data specifications has resulted in a small yet flexible metadata model.  The State Core Metadata Repository allows for various organizations to map their data to the data of other organizations.  This means that once an organization has mapped to the State Core model, all other organizations are able to map to that source.  Ultimately, standardized reports will be created against the State Core model, providing states a method of generating all of their Federally mandated reporting without having to develop them.  Additionally, states and organizations can contribute their own reports for use by other states and organizations.  By creating a data lexicon for all education data, there is no need for separate organizations to recreate the wheel; collaboratively, all participants create one object that is reusable by all.

Terminology

• Jurisdiction – Represents States, governing bodies and other organizations
• Specification - A set of data; it can represent an XML specification, an SLDS, or any other structured data set
• Domain – An area of related data items that may be a subset of a Specification, or topically represent an entire Specification
• Entity – Represents a physical table within a data model, or a specific subset of a Domain
• Attribute – Represents the lowest level of a data element; a database field or XML element
• Option Set – Is a collection of possible values

Assumptions

• This model assumes that the following relationships are true:
• Jurisdictions contain one or more Specifications
• Specifications contain one or more Domains
• Domains are comprised of one or more Entities
• Entities are one or more Attributes
• Attributes may be mapped to other Attributes
• Attribute have values that may be constrained by Option Sets
• Option Sets contain one or more Values

What do you think of having a Metadata Repository for associating your data to other organizations and data specifications?  Are there topics that you feel the Repository should be expanded to include?