Private service using MS public school students’ data
Former Mississippi Department of Education (MDE) employee Russ Davis has worked on the accountability model as recently as 2011, interdepartmental e-mails show. He owns Blue Consulting Group, which offers a web-based service – AccountabilityAnalyzer.com — that assists school administrators in understanding their students’ test data and identifying where improvements can be made.
Davis’ website provides quotes from three school districts – DeSoto County, Biloxi, and Choctaw County – endorsing the service and boasts that Accountability Analyzer is “now trusted by 1 in 2 school districts.”
Davis told Bigger Pie Forum that the service sells for “less than $5,000” annually and that the product is sold directly to school districts. Mississippi has more than 150 school districts.
Davis said he gets student testing data from the school districts, with which he signs confidentiality agreements: “We don’t actually directly grab that information. The schools get that information. They put it into our software. … We actually have a FERPA data sharing agreement that is signed with each district that allows the analyzation of those results. … We are very conscious of FERPA. We deal with it every single day.”?
Bigger Pie Forum has requested copies of data sharing agreements between Blue Consulting Group and school districts.
BPF
4/17/13
Magnolia Tribune
