Today I received an amusing memo dealing with North Carolina’s awful student information system, PowerSchool (a Pearson product).  Well, I am amused.  I doubt that public school employees feel the same way.

Regardless, as I read the memo I noticed a theme developing.  See if you can identify it…

“The Diploma Assessment Report will indicate “No” if a student is not a CTE concentrator; you may wish to manually verify the student to make a final determination.”

“Therefore, PowerSchool will not evaluate students against these plans now or in the future. It will identify these students as not eligible to graduate and they will have to be evaluated manually.”

“For seniors planning to graduate in June, principals and/or counselors must manually verify the transcripts of students identified by PowerSchool as not having met Future Ready Core minimum requirements.”

“PowerSchool provides a diploma override that will allow a student to be graduated based upon a manual evaluation.”

“The local board of education or their designee may choose to require principals and counselors to evaluate each senior manually to verify local requirements are met or may choose to waive local requirements.”

“Run the Diploma Assessment Report to determine which student transcripts or historical grades information you should review manually.”

“Users also have the ability to manually override the MARs, CTE Concentrator, and FRC requirements on the Student Academics screen.”

What good is a student information system if you have to enter and review the data manually?