In its efforts to improve the quality of public education, the federal government has tasked all fifty of the United States with monitoring students’ academic progress. In addition, the states are being required to comply with the reporting requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, a law that seeks to improve the performance of America’s elementary and secondary schools, while at the same time ensuring that no child is trapped in a failing school. Faced with the challenge of processing and integrating vast amounts of data, school districts are turning to third party vendors, such as eScholar, for such services. eScholar is the market's leading data warehouse and student identification system vendor. The eScholar Complete Data Warehouse™ and the eScholar Uniq-ID System™ are licensed for use by more than 2,800 districts across the U.S.

The eScholar Uniq-ID System is an application that assigns unique student identification numbers at both the district and state level. eScholar incorporates ChoiceMaker Technologies’ matching engine, which compares incoming student records to a master database and provides a match probability. The resulting decision determines whether a student already exists in the database, and appropriately assigns a new or existing ID.

The eScholar Uniq-ID System has enabled state education departments to identify every school-aged child and to provide a comprehensive and unified view of his/her multiple records. With this model and unique identifiers in place, educators are able to track student records across time, geography, and the wide variety of systems in which student data is found. These records can then be used by educators to provide students with targeted instruction even as these students move within a city or state.

Eight states currently use the system, with more deployments pending. School districts are using organized data for academic intervention planning, state reporting, trend analysis, program evaluation, and decision support - all involved in the fulfillment of the No Child Left Behind Act reporting requirements and even more important, helping individual students achieve a better education.

Shawn Bay, CEO of eScholar, says, “For educators, accuracy is key; it reduces effort and improves data quality, which leads to an improved ability to help children succeed. ChoiceMaker enables the eScholar Uniq-ID System to achieve the highest possible accuracy.