Robust longitudinal education and workforce data are integral in addressing disparities in educational opportunities and economic outcomes. However, not all states link their P-12, postsecondary, and workforce data sets. Kentucky and Tennessee are two state examples that proved success in linking data from different agencies. TICAS' brief analyzes…

The Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), formerly known as the Elementary and Secondary School Civil Rights Survey, is a part of the U.S. Department of Education's (ED's) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) strategy for administering and enforcing civil rights laws in U.S. public school districts and schools, including Puerto Rico.The CRDC collects a…

Regular attendance is essential to providing students with opportunities to learn. State and local education agencies (SEAs and LEAs) play a crucial role in tracking, measuring, and addressing student attendance. The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic affected the way that many SEAs and LEAs collect attendance data. This resource highlights…

Data governance is a core obligation for leaders and staff across any agency that collects, stores or uses individuals' data. It ensures that individuals' personal information is protected, and can support the continuous improvement of data quality and use, particularly when it includes well-defined processes, structure and responsibilities.…

One of the biggest challenges that states and local intermediaries face in setting up and scaling high-quality youth apprenticeships is gathering relevant, accurate and actionable data. High-quality data is an essential ingredient for a strong youth apprenticeship program because it equips state and local leaders to evaluate impact, monitor…

The State Higher Education Executive Officers Association's (SHEEO) "Communities of Practice" project builds upon SHEEO's ongoing efforts to measure the capacity and effective use of state postsecondary data systems and provides states with opportunities to develop solutions to common issues with those systems. The sixth Community of…

Emerging practices in both K-12 and higher education hold great promise in the establishment of equity frameworks. The use of finely disaggregated data, the effort to track additional student groups, and related work, all help to establish policies and tools to monitor the impact of reform efforts to address inequities. State programs and…

For any labor market to function properly, clear information is needed to guide decision making; its absence invariably leads to less than optimal decisions and inefficiencies. While the broader labor market is riddled with imperfect information, the teacher labor market is particularly vulnerable--largely for the lack of the most basic…

State and local education agencies across the country face challenges related to understanding and managing their teaching staff to best help students learn. Statewide longitudinal data systems (SLDSs) offer valuable information about teacher labor markets that can be used to analyze supply and demand, inform budget and staffing decisions, and…

With over 37 million residents, California is the most populous state in the country. California's primary and secondary schools enroll over 6.2 million students,1 and there are 3.4 million undergraduates attending 683 postsecondary institutions in California. Yet, because of the lack of a strong data infrastructure, we are unable to answer basic…

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…

Youth apprenticeship programs can give students access to valuable work-based learning experiences that provide insights into how their interest can connect to education and the workforce. Although these programs are often beneficial for participants, there is little data to show the programmatic landscape and impact. There are many challenges…

The most effective state efforts to improve student outcomes do not exist in a silo; they cut across multiple policy priorities to make data work for students. And while their crosscutting data initiatives can still be strengthened, some states are supporting schools with efforts that reach across the Data Quality Campaign's (DQC) Four Policy…

The Teacher Compensation Survey (TCS) was a research and development effort by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to explore the possibility of developing an administrative records survey that would compile compensation and demographic data on all public school teachers in the nation. A pilot survey in 2007 collected data from…

High-quality data governance, a body or process designed to make decisions about how state education data is linked, used, accessed, and protected, is key to establishing a culture of effective data use in states. The three data governance bodies featured in this paper--the Kentucky Center for Education and Workforce Statistics (KCEWS), the…