Written especially for state policy makers, administrators and advocates, this brief is our fifth annual examination of state attendance data, policy, and practices. It is based on a review of websites for all 50 states and Washington, D.C., as well as a survey completed by 49 states and Washington, D.C. State leaders, especially in state…

Data from assessment of library building use can aid in making important decisions, such as where a renovation would be most impactful, in addition to the actual impact of those types of renovations. This article examines space usage data collected at Valdosta State University's Odum Library from 2017 to 2021. Renovations in two key areas occurred…

The "Forum Guide to Data Governance" highlights how data governance programs benefit education agencies and provide timely and useful best practices, examples, and resources for agencies implementing or updating their data governance programs. This resource is intended to address the needs of federal, state, and local agencies related…

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…

The Forum Guide to Reporting Civil Rights Data presents a variety of effective methods through which local education agencies (LEAs) report civil rights data to the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights. In addition, the guide provides examples of how state education agencies can voluntarily help their LEAs with Civil Rights Data…

All students, regardless of race or ethnicity, benefit from having teachers and school leaders of color. Since principals of color are often more likely to hire and retain teachers of color, increasing school leader diversity is a key lever for addressing educational inequities. To provide advocates and policymakers with context on this important…

This publication highlights how state leaders tackle data interoperability with the emergence of data standards for student information, assessment, digital content, and other educational applications. While states are at various maturity levels for interoperability, each state shares goals for interoperability, the drivers for those goals,…

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,…

With the growing popularity of MOOCs and sharp trend of digitalizing education, there is a huge amount of free digital educational material on the web along with the activity logs of large number of participating students. However, this data is largely unstructured and there is hardly any information about the relationship between material from…

Mokken scale analysis is a probabilistic nonparametric approach that offers statistical and graphical tools for evaluating the quality of social science measurement without placing potentially inappropriate restrictions on the structure of a data set. In particular, Mokken scaling provides a useful method for evaluating important measurement…

The current accountability conversation in teacher education is the direct result of the policy paradigms that shape our understandings of schooling and reform. The authors present cases from Georgia and Missouri illustrating how these policy paradigms have resulted in outcomes-based accountability initiatives for teacher education. Specifically,…

This brief examines strategies for leveraging State longitudinal data systems (SLDS) to promote college and career readiness (CCR) goals. The examples provided are based on current state efforts to use their state longitudinal data systems to achieve their CCR vision and goals. The following information outlines the basic purpose and elements of…

In 2002, the Monroe County, Georgia, school system was, according to its then-superintendent Scott Cowart, "underperforming." Test scores were low, and several schools faced interventions under the new No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). One decade later, the 4,000-student school district in central Georgia is one of the highest-performing…

REL Pacific at McREL, one of 10 Regional Educational Laboratories (RELs) funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (IES), serves educators in American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia (Chuuk, Kosrae, Pohnpei, and Yap), Guam, Hawai'i, the Republic of the…

Head Start programs are a critical component of early care and education. At present, there is no requirement for local Head Start programs to link or share their data with other state data systems. However, several states are making advances toward linking and/or sharing data across their state's K-12 data system or other services' data systems.…