Department of Education
Kevin Huffman, Commissioner

Last Update:10/26/2011

Tennessee Career-Technical Data Reporting System

TIGER (TN-TIGER) (Timely, Information, Gathering, Examination and Reporting)

To produce the data required for Perkins end-of-year reporting, the Tennessee State Department of Education (SDE) career-technical (CTE) staff had been processing over 300,000 scan sheets each year! This process was expensive, time consuming, labor intensive and not as accurate as possible. A component of the student follow-up requirement meant mailing a floppy disk back and forth from Nashville to each school system—Local Education Agency (LEA).

Since 2003, the CTE division has implemented a secured, web-based data collection system called TIGER. For the first time, TIGER allowed career-technical directors in each Tennessee school system to report their data electronically though an UPLOAD function on the State of Tennessee secured web site.

eTIGER (EIS-TIGER)

eTIGER was officially implemented in October, 2005. It is a further development of the TN-TIGER system. The name eTIGER refers to the coordination in data collection between the state EIS (Education Information System) data and the state eTIGER system. Beginning with the 2005-06 school year, the CTE staff will pre-populate eTIGER with data reported to the EIS system.

This new functionality will allow continuous data verification and feedback between the SDE and each school system with CTE programming in Tennessee. During this transitional year, if EIS data are unavailable, the data collection staff will be able to process from spreadsheets or flat files.

The exciting part of this upgraded data collection system is that data editing and verification will be performed by each individual CTE teacher—the person who has the best knowledge regarding the data for each student. The teacher will attest to the veracity of the data. The CTE director in each school system will then be able to check the data from each system reporting and approve its accuracy.

Some benefits of on-line, real-time reporting are efficient management of time and resources, accuracy of data reported, budget savings, and front-line data verification from classroom teachers.

The next steps in the development of data reporting system include an automated CTE high school graduate follow-up system, postsecondary linkages to an SDE data warehouse, pro-active technical assistance to the LEA, linkages to SSMS(STAR) data system when all LEA data systems are on-line with the SDE, and extraction of all data from the SDE data warehouse.