Does these mean that the "CAO" will be the one who has to pay back the $80 mil, he's Accountable right?

I'm a school psychologist who works with people and data. I've been frustrated with user-unfriendly technology throughout my career. Student data management systems are one of my sore spots.

The quote from the article tells it all: "Bad user experience: Many principals have complained that it runs slowly, lacks vital information, and is often too frustrating to use."

NYC isn't the only place experiencing usability problems with education data management systems.

I work in North Carolina, a state that adopted the NC WISE data management system about 10 years ago, at quite an expense. My school district will be moving to the system next year, so I do not have personal experience with the system. To prepare myself tof the change, I viewed the multitude of questions discussed on the NC WISE Questions/FAQ website. One glance and you will quickly see that ease-of-use was probably not a priority during the system's development: http://www.ncwise.org/ncwiseQuesFAQ.html

By the way, the NC WISE system doesn't play well with data-management systems designed for N.C. special education student information. Many districts use CECAS for handling this data, but as you can see from a recent "bug" list, there are numerous problems: http://www.nccecas.org/systemupdates/openbugs.html

Problems with the NC WISE system have been documented for years. Here are a few examples:

eSchool News article, 2004: http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/index.cfm?i=35547&CFID=5146403&CFTOKEN=38831309

Byte and Switch article, 2006: http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=105150

Note: I returned to school a few years ago to study computers/technology part-time, including HCI, so I know that there is much room for improvement.

So...how do I feel better about my data warehouse fiasco? :-)

Same problem, smaller scale. You’ve opened the door for me to rant a bit about a program that was recently imposed on the special educators in our five town school district at a cost that I have been unable, to date, to track down—but I intend to.

Our small rural district here in Vermont recently bought into a special education management program. As the coordinator of special education services and assistant principal at my school, I have found the program difficult to use and inefficient.

The program, Case-e, was created with little or no understanding of the special education process. The creators didn’t even bother to use the special education terminology we use in Vermont on the countless, seemingly arbitrarily placed, tabs. Each section of an evaluation or individualized education plan is isolated so that the user can’t see the report until it is finished. And, there is no spell check! Really, I’m not kidding. Just as annoying, test scores cannot be shown in columns. Oh, you think I’m making this up? No, the program does not allow it. The support folks from the company said they can’t fix it because it was “created by engineers in California.” What is that suppose to mean? They are willing to sell a program but to be responsible for how it works?

According to their website, the company claims their goal is to “help special educators reduce their time spent on paperwork and administrative duties so they can spend more of their time and energy helping students.” Wrong. The final product is unattractive and difficult to read, often with big blank spaces and sections of the report divided where they shouldn’t be. Not only does the original document take significantly longer to prepare, but also I am ashamed to give it to parents. I always apologize for it and often give them a second copy of a report that I have redone in my old parent-friendly format.

Finally, the program claims to provide “total support… you have all the assistance you need, when you need it.” Not true. If the creators knew anything about teachers, they would know that we often write these reports late at night and on the weekends. Teaching is not a 9 to 5 job. Their technical assistant folks need to keep the same hours that teachers do.

Beyond the cost of this program, this is costing our district many extra hous of professional time. I could go on, but I won’t. Grrr...

I'm a principal in NYC and can verify for you that ARIS is the fiasco you describe. For a system with very few active users, it's shockingly slow. (What will happen when everyone is actually using it?) Currently, ARIS is a pretty user interface on top of an outdated (and equally atrocious) computer system in which we still do all of our data entry. No new information can be put into ARIS. You can only view the information and produce more attractive looking reports which mostly concern test scores.
The trainings, largely done by IBM staffers with no sense of what we would need/want from a data system, have been a total waste of time. I have spent more time in training about how to use ARIS than I have actually using it for anything to help my students or my school. And yes, I just lost tens of thousands of dollars from my budget.