Objectives of Data Improvement System

The K-12 Data Governance group's primary role is to assist in the design and implementation of a K-12 education data improvement system that is used by school districts and the state. The data improvement system, created by the 2009 Legislature, is described in Part II of Engrossed Substitute House Bill 2261 (PDF).

Specifically, elements that are to be part of the system include (but are not limited to):

• Comprehensive educator information, such as courses taught, years of experience, compensation, class size, number of languages and which languages are spoken by students, and general resources available for classroom needs.
• Robust student information, such as student characteristics, course and program enrollment, and assessment performance.
• A dropout early warning system.
• Separate accounting of state, federal, and local revenues and costs.
• The capacity to link program cost information with student performance information to gauge the cost-effectiveness of programs.
• An anonymous, nonidentifiable replicated copy of data that is updated at least quarterly, and made available to the public by the state.

Section 202 of ESHB 2261 describes the expectations for the data improvement system. Section 203 describes the duties of the Data Governance work group.

One of the expectations of the Data Governance Group outlined in the legislation was the identification of the critical research and policy questions that need to be addressed by the K-12 data system. A contract was secured from a consulting group to perform this work. Their full report is available and an executive summary.

Following identification of the critical research and policy questions the consulting group next conducted a gap analysis of the data needed to address the questions and the data currently collected at the state level. The consultant also identified the gaps in data collected at the state level and the data collections recommended in the National Education Data Model. The Data Gap Analysis report can be found here.

OSPI provided a preliminary status report on November 15, 2009. The K-12 Education Data Governance: Preliminary Report provides background information on the Legislative expectations for a K-12 education data system, the progress that has been made in meeting the Legislative expectations, and our future actions and plans. A final report was completed in September. The K-12 Education Data Governance and Statewide K-12 Longitudinal Data System Final Report (and Appendix) outlines the recommendations from the gap analysis consultant, provides an update on numerous activities, contains budget recommendations to maintain data governance work and fund a study on suspension and expulsion and outlines a data governance work plan.