Setting Priorities for Federal Data Access to Expand The Context for Education Data

Research Project

Passage of the Evidence Act in July 2019 opened opportunities to integrate administrative data across agencies. For the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the Evidence Act this opportunity to broaden the context for NCES data bases expands the potential scope for education research and enables enrichment of the information base for educational policy. In 2021, NCES charged the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS) with convening a panel of experts to consider the potential benefits from linking information from other federal agencies with NCES data bases and to offer suggestions for establishing priorities for selecting specific data bases to be linked or integrated.

Project Goal: 

The panel was specifically asked to set priorities for accessing federal data outside the Department of Education, to identify the potential value and the challenges with the goals of enhancing primary education information and supporting external objectives that require education data.

Research Team: 

Mary Bohman, (Acting Director and Deputy Director of the Bureau of Economic Analysis)
Dan Goldhaber, (Director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) at the American Institutes for Research, and Director of the Center for Education Data & Research (CEDR) at Frederick M. Hess, (Resident Scholar and Director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI)))
Barry Johnson, (Acting Chief Research and Analytics Officer and Director of Statistics of Income Division (SOI) at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS))
Shelly Wilkie Martinez, (Senior Statistician at the Office of Management and Budget, Statistical and Science Policy, Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs)
Nancy Potok, (CEO of NAPx Consulting)
Michael Ratcliffe, (Senior Geographer in the U.S. Census Bureau’s Geography Division)
Gema Zamarro, (Professor and 21st Century Endowed Chair in Teacher Quality at the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, Director at Charassein, and Adjunct Senior Economist at the USC)
Nell Sedransk, (Director, National Institute of Statistical Sciences-DC)
Brian Habing, (Associate Director for Education Research at NISS, and Associate Professor of Statistics at University of South Carolina)
Alexi Albert, (Research Assistant, National Institute of Statistical Science)
Ya Mo, (Research Fellow, National Institute of Statistical Sciences; Assistant Professor, Boise State University)