Overview
The National Education Data Partnership (NEDP) is a collaboration created to help transform the way education information is collected, shared, and used by states, educators, policymakers, superintendents, and parents. The NEDP partners include the Council of Chief State School Officers, Standard & Poor’s School Evaluation Services, and CELT Corporation. Initially launched in August 2004, the NEDP continues to be generously funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
State Education Data Center
With initial funding from the NEDP, the State Education Data Center (SEDC) will position itself as a leading voice on public education data and will focus on two work strands: (1) serving as a national advocacy leader for quality education data collection, standards, and use; and (2) serving as the nation’s provider of a free, easy-to-use website featuring state education data and analytic tools.
The SEDC’s Advisory Council of chiefs, national data collectors, and national education policy organizations will refine and enhance the national conversation on the appropriate collection, use, and analysis of state education data.
SchoolDataDirect.org: A Robust Web-Based Analytical Service for State Education Data
SchoolDataDirect.org is a powerful online service available to the general public targeted at all education stakeholders, including policymakers, administrators, researchers, and parents. It offers unique comparison tools, ratios, benchmarks, and performance indicators designed to assist decision makers in better understanding what is happening in our nation’s school systems, how much we are spending, and where we can focus resources or attention to improve performance.
The site has a new feature (available late summer 2007) enabling users, for the first time ever, to download education data from across the nation from a single website. The majority of the data is provided by state education agencies and is accessed by year by state, district, or school. Some data is provided by third parties including ACT, the College Board, and NCES.
Coordinated Data Ask
The Coordinated Data Ask (CDA) is a collaborative effort of the Council’s National Education Data Partnership (NEDP), the Data Quality Campaign (DQC) partners, and the U.S. Department of Education (ED) to develop a single data collection template of the data elements most commonly requested from the State Education Agencies (SEA). The template reflects input from state education agencies and has been crosswalked to EDFacts data groups and the Schools Interoperability Framework data objects. Many of the data elements in the CDA can be found on SchoolDataDirect.org. While the DQC partners have committed to using this template for their primary data collection needs, the states have been encouraged to begin developing files around this template to further reduce the burden on their data collection/reporting efforts.
Consulting and Technical Assistance to States
EIMAC’s Longitudinal Student Data Systems Task Force
CCSSO is working with states to develop best practice materials to assist states in developing longitundinal data systems. A special task force of CCSSO's Education Information Management Advisory Consortium (EIMAC) is providing guidance on this work.
DSAC Round II
CCSSO has partnered with the Center for Educational Leadership and Technology (CELT) to promote collaboration among state and district education leaders by advising them on the use of business processes to improve planning and develop frameworks for the effective use of student information. This project expands the work of an earlier project known as the Decision Support Architecture Consortium (DSAC), which evaluated the information systems of 26 states, created a model for defining and creating student data systems, and recommended the effective use of system-wide data to improve student instruction and assessment.
Data Quality Campaign Annual State Survey
The Data Quality Campaign (DQC) surveys states about their student data systems to determine the number of states that have built (and are building) the infrastructure to tap into the power of longitudinal data. Begun in 2003 by the National Center for Educational Accountability, the DQC has increased both the scope and the visibility of this survey. Please visit their website for detailed state-by-state analysis of survey results.
Project Staff
Scott Montgomery, scottm@ccsso.org, 202.326.8688
Deborah Newby, deborahn@ccsso.org, 202.336.7052
Paige Kowalski, paigek@ccsso.org, 202.336.7033
Maureen Matthews, maureenm@ccsso.org, 202.336.7023
Amanda Miller, amandam@ccsso.org, 202.336.7025
