As Published In February 2007

Human Resources

Filling the Gaps
By Ann C. Logue

Richardson, Texas, schools Get to know their teachers better with Oracle HR.

Most offices could function for a week or two while the boss is out of town, but a fourth-grade classroom would descend into chaos in about five minutes without a caring yet authoritative figure standing in the front of the room.

Getting the right person in each classroom is a challenge that school systems face each year, when they hire teachers. School systems are inundated with résumés in the winter and spring from potential hires—including new college graduates and people looking to relocate or change careers. Schools need to have good people in place at the start of the school year, so principals, who already have a lot on their plates, are looking for candidates who have the skills their schools need—and can come in for interviews in time to get hired and prepared before that first day of school. Principals must also comply with civil service requirements, because public school systems are government organizations. In many districts, teachers are unionized, adding an additional layer of hiring regulations.

These problems don't go away after Labor Day. Every day that a school is in session, teachers get sick, have doctors' appointments, or use family leave. To reduce the time spent finding qualified teachers, many school systems are turning to the human resources management applications that are part of Oracle E-Business Suite.

One of them is the Richardson Independent School District (RISD), which serves students in parts of the Texas cities of Dallas, Garland, and Richardson. More than 34,000 students attend RISD's 4 high schools, 8 junior high schools, 1 freshman center (a facility for ninth graders before they move on to a larger high school), 41 elementary schools, and 1 alternative-learning center. Those students are taught by 2,466 nonunion teachers who are supported by another 2,434 administrative and auxiliary staffers, such as librarians, cafeteria staff, and IT managers. Each year, about 750 new employees are hired into the system and another 500 request transfers within the district from one school to another.

To manage its operations, RISD uses Oracle E-Business Suite, including financial, procurement, and human resources (HR) management modules. The HR modules allow the district to get the right people in classrooms faster, track employees from their recruitment to their retirement, and manage payroll, performance tracking, and compensation. Richardson's school system installed Oracle software in September 2001 to replace a homegrown program that routed résumés. That résumé-routing feature was important to the district, and it was one that could be maintained in the Oracle system without customization.

"Rather than go for a custom system that interfaced to Oracle E-Business Suite or cut corners in the employee selection process, the Human Resources department of Richardson strategically planned and implemented a system that works seamlessly with its Oracle Applications infrastructure," says Norma Comer, the district's executive director, information systems.

RISD's experience in managing its Oracle system and seeking novel ways to use that system to run the schools better has led Comer and her colleagues to be active members of the Oracle Applications Users Group. The district is the founding member of the K-12 Education Special Interest Group (SIG), which allows school systems using Oracle to share information about how technology can improve student performance. It's a rapidly evolving field, as the education sector faces challenges unlike those in private industries (see the sidebar, "Human Resources Challenges Faced by Public Schools").

Snapshot Richardson Independent School District (RISD) www.risd.org Employees: 4,900 Oracle products and services: Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11.5.10.2, including Human Resources, Payroll, and Self-Service Human Resources Other products and services: Consulting services from KPMG and BearingPoint

"One of the challenges is to push a good candidate's résumé out to as many school principals as possible," says Anand Rao, the program manager for enterprise resource planning who handles the operations of RISD's Oracle E-Business Suite. This starts through an online job application for all positions, both instructional and administrative, on the district's Web site. Candidates enter their information, which is sent to the RISD Human Resources department for review. After an initial interview performed through the HR office, information pertaining to candidates is forwarded to each of Richardson's 51 principals, who select candidates to be brought in for an interview at the school. Principals can search on 22 different fields, including Job Desired, Years of Experience, Location Desired, Education Level, Teaching Certifications, Teaching Subject, Interview Score, Interview Date, Job Skills, and Date Available.

"Principals get equal access to the candidates," Rao says, which reduces some of the competition within the district to keep the performance of all of Richardson's schools at the same high level. Candidates apply to the RISD central office, not to one particular school, and they are free to interview with any interested principal. Candidate preferences in school placement are considered, but no principal can hoard candidates. Users perceived the system as inherently fair and efficient, which helped a great deal in gaining their acceptance. "Initially people had to get used to the look and feel of the system, but overall the majority of the principals and managers find the system easy to use," says Barbara Hargrove, director of salary administration for RISD.

Before the system was put into place, principals generally had to go to the central office to read through résumés, or else they had to wade through envelopes of photocopies received via interoffice mail. That system not only took up a lot of time better spent in the school, but it also increased the likelihood that teachers with unique skill sets would fall through the cracks. For example, in the paper system, it might be easy to overlook a high school Spanish teacher who was also qualified to be a diving coach. Using the Oracle system, principals would be able to flag that résumé easily and bring the candidate in for an interview.

Beyond seeing whether a candidate is interested in the position and has certifications, principals can also see the type of certifications the candidate has earned, the universities he or she has attended, years of experience, and HR interview score. "This has made good candidates more visible," says Rao, a five-year employee of RISD who was involved with the implementation. "One of the biggest challenges was making sure we were giving principals enough information to select qualified candidates for the open positions but yet not making it too cumbersome to use," Hargrove adds. Once a candidate is hired, RISD can use the data collected during the hiring process to set up a personnel file and track the employee through his or her career with the district, up to retirement.

For More Information Oracle K-12 Education Applications Oracle Applications Oracle Human Capital Management

The No Child Left Behind Act, signed into law in 2002, includes provisions intended to ensure that students are taught by "highly qualified" teachers—which the act defines as those who have at least a bachelor's degree in the subject taught, have demonstrated knowledge of that subject, and are fully certified by the state. The percentage of highly qualified teachers in a school is one of the measurements used to judge compliance with the No Child Left Behind Act, so that metric affects a school's reputation and its funding. This in turn puts pressure on the school district to collect data on the qualifications of its hires for permanent and substitute positions, adding an additional complication to an already tough task. Like most school districts, RISD receives most of its operating budget from property taxes, so local voters are paying close attention to the district's financial and academic performance—just one more reason why HR management is so important.

"One of the great things about this system is that we continue to find ways to improve upon the original product," Hargrove says. That's important given changing regulations and evolving knowledge about how best to generate strong student performance, and it's one reason why RISD will rely on Oracle to improve student achievement and employee satisfaction.

Human Resources Challenges Faced by Public Schools Public education is a personnel-intensive service business. Data collected by the U.S. Department of Education shows that 71 percent of all school system expenditures goes toward salaries and another 19.3 percent goes toward employee benefits. But note what school systems are not spending big money on: information technology. Human resources (HR) information systems seem to be a low priority in most school districts despite the people-intensive nature of the business. "Very few school systems, at least that we found, think strategically," says Anthony Milanowski, a researcher with the University of Wisconsin Center for Education Research (www.wcer.wisc.edu) who has studied HR management issues in education. Milanowski notes that school systems vary widely in size: Even in 2006, some small rural districts are tracking applicants with index cards, and some don't track teacher performance at all. Larger systems, especially those that have performance problems, may have sophisticated tracking systems because they need to collect data in order to perform. And almost all districts, adds Milanowski, are guilty of silo behavior, in which training is kept separate from HR and the HR group's primary function is to work on union contract compliance issues. "They've been pretty much conditioned to be reactive," he says. In many cases, Milanowski says, a district's HR director may be a former principal or teacher looking for a career change. "It's not as if they are trained on the latest in HR technology," he says. And, he says, education operates under a longstanding belief that teachers are interchangeable. "The tradition of the profession and the training of teachers is slow to change. Human resources management in education is trying to break through this idea that a teacher is a teacher is a teacher." He says the research indicates that this notion holds in union and nonunion districts as well as in private and charter schools. Anyone who has gone to school knows that different teachers are different; some are great, and some are terrible. The issue is how to distinguish what's simply a personality clash between a teacher and a student—or a teacher and a principal—and figure out which teachers really do a better job of educating. Milanowski has noticed a divide between teachers and officials at all levels of school system management, which he finds interesting given that most principals, administrators, and superintendents are former teachers. These real cultural issues have made it difficult to design and operate effective incentive compensation systems. "Teachers have a real suspicion of management and a fear that management will use the data against them," he says. Administrators don't necessarily want to see data, either, he says, because it may uncover problems with programs or approaches they advocate. Milanowski says it should be possible to match information about teachers and students in order to figure out which teachers are most effective in improving student performance, but it's not easy—yet. "Sometimes the information systems are just not set up for the needs of education," he says, and some software has quirks that make the database design difficult. For example, résumé management systems may be separate from teacher employment records. "How can you tell if teachers from certain preparatory programs are better or worse? How can you do this if you can't link information from the application to where the teacher is now teaching?" he asks. Another hurdle is that many school systems redo everything at the start of a new school year, right down to changing teacher IDs in their student databases. That may not cause problems if all a district wants to do is print out schedules, but if district management wants to track teachers and students over the years, the lack of a consistent ID means that the data is worthless. "IT-wise, it's a huge issue to get the data into the warehouse," Milanowski says. Finally, most students don't have just one single teacher in any given year. High school students may have ten different teachers in the course of the year, and elementary students may have both a classroom teacher and an English as a Second Language instructor or a learning disabilities tutor. "The database design has got to be really good to accommodate that," Milanowski says. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, the focus has been to collect data on teachers to verify that they are highly qualified. With that behind them, school districts will start to work on teacher performance, but they may have to redesign their systems to do so. But bringing robust management information systems to school systems isn't impossible. One trend that Milanowski has noticed is that smaller school systems are forming consortia to combine their information technology. "We've seen a little of that in Wisconsin," he says. "The state put together a teacher application program that different school systems should join."