Educations Data Management Initiative Significant Progress Made But Better Planning Needed To Accomplish Project Goals Report To Congressional Committees

Author : David Bellis
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 37 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (16 download)

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Download or read book Education's Data Management Initiative written by David Bellis and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 37 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a condition of receiving federal funding for elementary and secondary education programs, states each year provide vast amounts of data to Education. While the need for information that informs evaluation is important (particularly with the No Child Left Behind Act), Education's data gathering has heretofore presented some problems. It has been burdensome to states because there are multiple and redundant requests administered by a number of offices. In addition, the resulting data supplied by states has not been accurate, timely, or conducive to assessing program performance. To improve the information by which it evaluates such programs and also to ease states' reporting burden, Education in 2002 initiated an ambitious, multi-year plan to consolidate elementary and secondary data collections into a single, department-wide system focused on performance. Given its importance, a study, under the authority of the Comptroller General, to provide Congress with information on its progress was prepared. Through its Performance-Based Data Management Initiative (PBDMI), Education has consolidated and defined much of the data it anticipates collecting under a unified system. Education reports that many data definitions have been agreed-to and data redundancies eliminated. PBDMI officials also said that to date, however, it has not been able to resolve all remaining differences among the program offices that manage many of the different data collections. PBDMI officials have conducted extensive outreach to the states to advance the initiative. The outreach to states involved regional conferences, two rounds of site visits, and according to officials, $100,000 in grants to most states to help offset their costs. State data providers responding to our survey expressed general satisfaction with the department's outreach, but some were not optimistic that the initiative would ease their reporting burden or enhance their own analytic capacity. The states were not able to produce enough data during test submissions in 2003 and 2004 to enable data quality verification or phasing out the department's multiple data collections. With regard to the lack of sufficient data from many states, Education officials said some lack the technical capacity needed to produce new performance data requirements. State data providers reported having competing demands for their time and resources, given other federal initiatives. Education officials have decided to proceed with the undertaking and have developed a draft interim strategy for moving forward. But they currently have no formal plan for how they would overcome obstacles such as the lack of state data and other technical and training delays to the initiative. Appended are: (1) Scope and Methodology; (2) Comments from the Department of Education; and (3) GAO Contact and Staff Acknowledgments.