PED's new data system will speed up performance reporting

On July 8, the Albuquerque Journal ran an editorial on Nova, the data collection system that will replace the current Student and Teacher Accountability Reporting System (STARS), the system that currently collects data from schools and stores it into a centralized, secure database for analysis and reporting. The New Mexico Public Education Department is excited to launch the new Nova system.

STARS is over 15 years old. Getting data into STARS and getting data out of STARS is burdensome. PED is transitioning to a modern system. That new system is called Nova.

The move to the Nova system is strategic. Nova is designed to expand to include more data families. It modernizes the data collection, validation and certification process. These processes are required to determine school funding and to calculate school performance.

Nova facilitates higher quality data in a shorter amount of time.

The district and charter schools’ data is digitally streamed to Nova. Nova also performs automated data quality checks at several steps in the process, allowing schools to make corrections early so when the PED programs check the data, it is of higher quality.

After the data is collected and certified, additional analysis steps are done to calculate performance metrics, such as graduation rates. The process to determine the performance metrics happens outside the Nova system. With Nova, the data required to calculate performance metrics will be available sooner.

STARS collects student, educator and school data from about 190 school districts and charter schools. The data validation and certification process, which is currently a manual process, can take months.

In the last legislative session, our office received funding to develop a more seamless process to report on absenteeism and measure outcomes from districts’ attendance improvement plans. This new process will use data from the Nova system. The work on that project is planned to begin in the December/January timeframe.

Nova is a large complex system. We expect issues to arise, however, we will resolve issues by working collaboratively with all the school districts and charter schools.

The bottom line: The school, teacher and student data Nova collects is used to determine funding and performance metrics. Nova speeds up the process, so we know the health of our schools.