Map Updates for August 2020 |
|
By now you may have heard that Governor Whitmer has signed the Return to Learn legislation, which among other provisions, requires districts to deliver benchmark assessments in the 2020-21 school year. The main points of that legislation that pertain to use of MiDataHub are:
- Districts must deliver a benchmark assessment in the first 9-weeks of school and then again at the end of the school year.
- MDE must approve a list of 4-5 benchmark assessments, with one to provide a benchmark tool at no cost to districts.
- Districts must send aggregate district-level data (excluding local benchmark assessments) to MiDataHub by June 30, 2021.
- MiDataHub will compile the data and send to CEPI.
- CEPI and MDE will provide a report to the Governor as well as the House and Senate education committees by August 1, 2021 to identify the number and percent of students who are significantly behind grade level.
- The data may also be used to identify districts and schools where pupil achievement has increased or decreased, but it will not be used for accountability purposes.
The MiDataHub team has been fielding a number of questions regarding the legislation and what it means for districts.
Q1: Is the connection to MiDataHub now a mandate? Will districts/PSAs need to connect to MiDataHub to submit data? Or will there be an alternate data submission path?
- The legislation requires districts to report aggregate district-level data to MiDataHub by June 30th.
- Typically, districts using MiDataHub provide detailed student-level data, which can be used to produce the aggregate data.
-
At present, there is no mechanism for districts to submit aggregate data to MiDataHub. Per a memo from Dr. Venessa Keesler, “MDE and CEPI will work with the regional data hubs to determine the form and manner of this reporting and will communicate more information about this in the future”.
- The MiDataHub Team is working towards a goal of using the SIS data provided by districts along with benchmark assessment data loaded from MDE approved providers to compute the identified aggregates, present them to districts for data quality review, and then forward the results to CEPI and MDE by the June 30th deadline. For districts on MiDataHub, this will be the easiest way to complete that work.
Q2: What if MiDataHub does not support the assessment that is selected by the district?
-
In Dr. Keesler’s memo, it was announced that the Michigan Department of Education (MDE) has approved four benchmark assessments/vendors
- NWEA
- Curriculum Associates iReady
- Renaissance Learning STAR
- DRC Smarter Balanced and MDE’s Early Literacy Assessment (this is the “free” option for districts)
- MiDataHub has been working with NWEA, Curriculum Associates and Renaissance Learning and we expect that those assessments will be fully supported for the purposes of the legislation.
- MDE is coordinating with DRC to integrate with MiDataHub. An alternate route for this tool would be that MDE will receive those results directly from DRC, and could provide that data to MiDataHub in a similar manner to the M-STEP assessment data provided. That solution is being explored, and would round out the assessments that must be supported.
- The legislation allows for other assessments and local assessment options, but it is unclear on how that information may be used in reporting to CEPI and MDE. More to come on this topic.
Q3: What are the next steps? How can my district best prepare to meet the benchmark assessment requirements via MiDataHub?
-
Check the status of your district in our ISD and District Participation spreadsheet. Your district should show as “Active” in the Status column and with a “1” in the Live column.
- Ensure that your SIS is sending data for the 2020-21 school year and that data quality reports, such as the At-A-Glance report, are showing the data properly for your district.
- Work to ensure that your identified benchmark assessment data is flowing into MiDataHub. This data will need to be in place by June 30, 2021. The MiDataHub team is currently working to modify the import process for each benchmark assessment and will provide more information as the school year progresses.
- For help or further assistance on any of the above items, please contact the MiDataHub Support Desk.
-
Email support@midatahub.org to create a ticket.
- Call 269-250-9240. If you reach voicemail, please leave a message and we will contact you.
- Kevin Bullard and Windee Wagner from the MiDataHub Support desk will either work with you directly or refer you to one of our Data Hub Support Specialists statewide.
|
|
Please note we also have monthly SIS status calls that you are welcome to attend. These meetings are typically on the second Tuesday of every month at varying times, and are 30 minutes. If you would like to attend these short, yet informative meetings, please send us an email to support@midatahub.org including what meeting you would like to attend.
|
|
Please see the statement below from our colleagues at CEPI regarding system updates and an offline period for services.
Accordingly, the UIC and Snack-pack services will be offline from Friday, September 11th at 4pm through Monday, September 21st only.
CEPI has been upgrading its existing database servers to Microsoft SQL Server 2017 for the past several months. This upgrade improves processing capacity and allows our database administrator staff to leverage new SQL features.
The final phase of updates focuses on production database servers, which host our live collection application data, thus this update will require a pause to system availability. CEPI production database servers, applications and services will be offline from Friday, Sept. 11 at 4 p.m. through Monday, Sept. 21. Additionally, MSDS will remain offline through Sunday, Sept. 27 to perform rollover to the 2020-21 school year; however, the MI Data Hub Identities API (UIC and Snack-pack) will be available during rollover.
|
|
In the last few weeks the MiDataHub team has been working collaboratively with Eidex to ensure school districts across the state have another successful year of integrating with Eidex. Earlier this week we released a validation query to be used in the Michigan Data Hub Cockpit. This script (“Eidex Readiness Script”) will output the total counts of records published from the Student Information System to MiDataHub for each field Eidex uses in its reporting suite. The export also provides the date of when the field was last updated and the date the field was initially populated (see example below). |
|
We have a step by step video, walking users through how to use the validation queries in the Michigan Data hub cockpit on the MiDataHub Youtube channel. Click here for a direct link to this video.
|
|
We were recently informed by Meal Magic that due to the COVID pandemic and required reallocation of resources, they will not be moving forward with integrating to the Michigan Data Hub using the 3.1 version of the EdFi API at this time.
Upon notification of this, MiDataHub wanted to work proactively on an alternative solution to ensure that any district currently using the MiDataHub integration wouldn’t be impacted.
MiDataHub currently has an outbound integration available and when used will export a CSV from MiDataHub to a secured location for Meal Magic to consume. Although this isn’t a true API it will ensure the need to provide Meal Magic with current data for up to date student records. We hope that Meal Magic will consider adopting the Ed-Fi model again in the future, allowing its customers to easily connect and send data to their system but until then please know we are continually innovating to ensure your data needs are met by creating these alternative solutions.
If you would like to learn more about configuring this outbound integration with Meal Magic please let us know by sending an email to support@midatahub.org.
|
|
Review the August 21, 2020 MiRead Memo for important updates, bug fixes, and new features.
|
|
New Single Sign on Districts
- Bay-Arenac ISD
- Macomb ISD
Need to register your district?
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
