Tracking Your Kid's Progress In School Online
By MIKE GRAHAM | wpix.com

May 28, 2009
QUEENS, N.Y. (WPIX)—
It has always been a concern of parents that they just are not totally sure how their children are doing in school. Now with just a click of a mouse parents will be able to track the attendance records, state test results and course grades of their kids.

State Department of Education spokesman Andrew Jacob told the NY Post "It's the first time parents will have online access to a lot of this data."

Families will also be able to track a school's overall ratings data bringing them closer to the daily workings of the school, teachers and students.

The data will be available from a program called ARIS-Achievement Reporting and Innovation System. It will afford those who link to it to discover certain student weaknesses, even as detailed as finding a problem with a student grasping the main idea of a reading passage.

ARIS was actually launched in 2007, but school principals complained that it did not work well. Now that the program has been given an overhaul and parents will be able to get involved as early as next week, confidence in the project is on the rise.