Mission is Massive, Complex, and Continuous

The sum of all Education tasks is a massive, complex, and continuous undertaking, and is accomplished by multiple teams of people at multiple levels.   Not only are each team's tasks intricate and difficult, but the integration of each team's ever-changing work products adds  another dimension of complexity. The necessary alignment between State-defined Frameworks, Teacher-defined Classroom Curriculum, and Assessments must be done accurately, and must be maintained as these materials change over time.

• This alignment must be done down at the discrete Knowledge/Skill item level, and these Knowledge/Skill items not only need to be accurately tracked through all materials (Frameworks, Curriculum, Assessments), they need to be accurately tracked all the way into Students' minds.  The complexity of these multi-team tasks and the lack of proper tools to manage and accomplish them often causes updates to Standards and Curriculum to be done cyclically only every few years

Mission Cries Out for End-To-End Management System

Accomplishing these tasks with any reliable accuracy and thoroughness is nearly impossible, yet it is currently being done mostly by hand and in Word documents and PDFs. 

• Merely putting it all on a content-independent, end-to-end, containment, management, distribution, alignment, and tracking system yields an immediate and tremendous boost to both accuracy and efficiency, and is therefore the obvious first step in Education improvement
• Only then can Educators start to examine the effectiveness of the materials, methods, and professionals and start to make steady incremental improvements resulting in increasing Student achievement

Size of Mission About To Increase Significantly

A major increase to the work load is coming soon, as States, Districts, and Teachers will have to put forth considerable effort to adopt and incorporate the new Common Core State Standards and accompanying Assessments component, as well as the NAEP's technology project, all while maintaining the ongoing functionality of all existing Education tasks.

• Common Core State Standards - The adoption process has not yet been defined by the Common Core Initiative but transitioning to the new Common Core Standards and later to the companion Assessment component must be addressed and accomplished by States, LEAs, and Teachers, and will entail something like taking the Common Core State Standards, and mapping/aligning to existing State Standards, Classroom Curriculum, and Assessments to ensure existing materials do or soon will cover 100% of the new Common Core State Standards
• NAEP Technological Literacy Framework Project - Additional changes will be necessary in the area of technology, as the Project has just released a draft framework that shows the intended massive scope of this new assessment component. In order for Students to perform well on this new test area, States, LEAs, and Teachers will need to ensure Students are taught the Knowledge/Skills in this framework, which will necessitate changes to Standards, Frameworks, Tracks, Curriculum, and Assessments