As the federal government appears poised to pull back on collecting and disseminating educational data, it’s increasingly critical that information collected and maintained by states and local districts is available to inform policy, according to a panel of experts—including Kevin Stange, co-director of U-M’s Education Policy Initiative—who spoke at a national educational data symposium earlier this month.
The conference, hosted by Harvard University’s Strategic Data Project, gathered hundreds of education researchers, leaders, and data experts from across the U.S. who are committed to using data to improve educational systems and organizations.
“This type of research is not partisan or political. We want to help children succeed, so we want to know what works. If a program helps students, we want to know that. If it doesn’t, we also want to know that because we don’t want to spend money on a big program that is not effective.”
-Kevin Stange
Stange presented with leaders from three other state educational data centers: Leah Goldsmith, executive director of the North Carolina Education Research Data Center; Holly Kosiewicz, director of the University of Texas at Dallas Education Research Center; and Laura Booker, executive director of the Tennessee Education Research Alliance. These centers have all created partnerships between universities and state education departments to help government officials use evidence to improve student outcomes.
With the threat of less federal data going forward, these partnerships will become even more essential in helping policymakers understand which programs help students the most, the panelists explained.
“The federal government has historically played a critical role of providing data and supporting research through a variety of mechanisms,” Stange explained. “But cuts to the federal Department of Education will likely hurt the federal government’s ability to collect that data. That will put a huge damper on anyone’s ability to conduct education research nationally.
That’s where the educational data centers come in. One of the goals of last week’s panel was to provide specific information about how other states can build these types of data centers.
The four states participating in the panel—Michigan, North Carolina, Texas, and Tennessee—have each had education data centers for more than 10 years, said Nicole Wagner Lam, associate director of U-M’s Education Policy Initiative, who organized and moderated the panel. Each received State Longitudinal Data System grants from the U.S. Department of Education to build the infrastructure to manage data collection.
“Without these grants, none of the four centers at the conference would have been able to do this work,” Lam said.
Currently, a few other states and large school districts are in the early stages of building these partnerships.
“During the panel, we heard a lot of questions about how to get a partnership like this started,” Lam said. “There is certainly an interest in and appetite for further investment in this kind of education data infrastructure work in other states and localities.”
In Michigan, the Michigan Education Data Center (MEDC)—which is part of U-M’s Education Policy Initiative—acts as a clearinghouse for educational data. The partnership includes experts from the state’s Department of Education and Center for Educational Performance & Information, and Michigan State University’s Education Policy Innovation Collaboration. Together, they work to collect, distribute, and analyze data on students from pre-K through college.
In his presentation last week, Stange gave two specific examples of how data distributed by MEDC is helping to shape the education landscape in Michigan.
First, over half the school districts across Michigan offer transitional kindergarten, a state-funded program that provides an additional year of early education before traditional kindergarten for children who need an extra year to develop social, emotional, and academic skills. Research supported by MEDC has found this program expands access to early childhood education, significantly improves kindergarten readiness, and leads to better math scores through third grade.
On the other end of the education continuum, data from MEDC has provided important information about Michigan’s largest state-run financial aid program, the Tuition Incentive Program (TIP), which provides tuition assistance to community college students who have received Medicaid at some point in their lives.
Research conducted by Stange and supported by the MEDC found that only 14% of eligible high school graduates and 29% of eligible community college students use the program, in large part because many students don’t realize they are eligible. Their research has prompted the state agency to increase efforts to educate students and schools about the program.
“The state doesn’t have the resources to do this type of analysis because they are busy running the program,” Stange said. “Absent this research, we’re blind to know what works and what doesn’t, or whether there are more effective or cost-effective ways to achieve the same goals.”
Next month, the same four state educational data centers will present at an Administrative Data Research Conference, hosted by the Massive Data Institute at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. The conference is focused on accelerating administrative data research that serves the public good.
“This conference is not focused on education, per se, but, we think our data center models—and especially the work that we’ve done to build strong university government partnerships—are transferable to other topic areas,” Lam said.
Written by Sheri Hall
