Each year, state legislators craft new policies that drive data use across their states, and as part of a comprehensive review of state education data legislation, the Data Quality Campaign (DQC) keeps track. In 2022, state legislators introduced 131 bills in 35 states--42 of which became law in 17 states-- that would govern the use of data along…

Evidence-based decision-making requires access to good and reliable data. In recent years, there has been a tremendous increase of data available to institutions, from internal as well as external sources. With this increase in data and its analytics, new challenges and questions arise. One of the most pertinent of which is the ethics and best…

When school and district administrators are empowered to lead a culture of data use, students do better. As states focus on improving overall school quality and ensuring success for all students, they need a workforce of school and district administrators who are equipped to use data to continuously improve. State leaders are uniquely positioned…

All students deserve a great education, one that affords them every opportunity to grow into knowledgeable and successful adults. To make this vision a reality, students, parents, educators, and policymakers must have access to the right information to make decisions and support student learning. The Data Quality Campaign's Four Policy Priorities…

Throughout history, a disproportionate number of learners have been tracked into terminal vocational programs based on their race, income, gender and disability, leading to jobs with uncertain promise of economic growth and prosperity. While the quality of Career Technical Education (CTE) programs has significantly improved since then, many…

Over the past decade, chronic absence has gone from being a virtually unknown concept to a national education metric that provides every school in the nation with critical data on how many students are missing so many days of school it jeopardizes their academic success. The inclusion of chronic absence in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) was…

Who uses student data? is an infographic created by the Data Quality Campaign. (Used with permission) It answers important privacy-related questions about who collects, uses, and distributes student data. Most personal student information stays local. Districts, states, and the federal government all collect data about students for important…

State leaders are increasingly focused on improving college and university programs that prepare teachers as a route to a high-quality teacher workforce. This work requires significant data capacity to reliably and securely link teachers with their students' achievement and growth data with the state's teacher preparation programs. This fact sheet…

All students deserve a great education, one that affords every opportunity for them to grow into knowledgeable and successful adults. To date, efforts to improve education have operated on a model of mass production, assuming--wrongly--that what works for some students must work for all. To change that model, students and their parents, teachers,…

Alignment between K-12 education and the workforce is critical because jobs are changing. Students must be prepared not only for the jobs of today but also for the jobs of the future. Securely linking data between state K-12 and workforce data systems can create a bridge between these agencies as they develop shared career readiness goals for…

The federal role in higher education has grown over the past two decades, and now a new administration has the opportunity to strengthen policies that support students and their colleges and universities. To help inform these decisions, the Urban Institute convened a bipartisan group of scholars and policy advisers to write a series of memos…

This tool and its supporting resources are intended to help education leaders understand and assess equitable access data to support a root-cause analysis and, ultimately, draft a State Plan to Ensure Equitable Access to Excellent Educators. The activities in this tool introduce metrics, address staff capacity for analyzing equitable access data,…

This field report is the ninth in a series produced by the Center on Innovations in Learning's League of Innovators. The series describes, discusses, and analyzes policies and practices that enable personalization in education. This report introduces sessions from the "Conversations with Innovators" event held at Temple University, June…

Background: In the last few decades, a focus on school accountability at the state and federal levels has created expectations for teachers to attend to data in increasingly structured ways. Although professional learning is often cited as an important facilitator of effective data use, research that focuses on the intersection of professional…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) preserves the most positive legacy of the No Child Left Behind era--more accurate and transparent data about the performance of all students--and helps states take their efforts to use data in support of student learning to the next level. The Data Quality Campaign (DQC) appreciates the opportunity to provide…