Well, tracking the kids through the grades is already done via cumulative files. Those contain grades, scores on standardized tests, records of disciplinary act

Well, tracking the kids through the grades is already done via cumulative files. Those contain grades, scores on standardized tests, records of disciplinary action, records of social services issues and that type of thing. All of that is being digitized now. In addition to all of that things like attendance are tracked with finer granularity as it's directly related to school funding. Then there's things like what period of time was the student on the free and reduced lunch program. How many meals did they receive during that time. That all gets tracked, again, for federal funding purposes. I'd have to pull out the Infinite Campus manual to get the details on some of the other things that are tracked, but I was quite surprised at all of it when I first saw it. Unfortunately in addition to their primary role as education, teachers are being asked to do more and more paper pushing and handling other duties pushed on them by politicians. Some of the data they keep track of is useful. For example, it's very difficult to get kids into the special ed program these days. You have to put kids through various phases of testing, and each phase requires a different amount of time between them or different benchmarks for evaluation. Some of these systems can keep track of that so as a child moves through the grades each teacher can pick up where the last left off. Sometimes it can take a couple of years for a child to start receiving special education services which is unfortunate because at that point they are even further behind where they should be. This is the direct result of parents not wanting their kids singled out or alienated by being labeled special education. So in that case the tracking is probably a good thing since there are definitive records of what steps have been completed.