National Center for Educational Statistics Winter Forum 2010

Last week I had the privilege of representing the Maine local school units at the National Forum on Educational Statistics winter session. http://nces.ed.gov/forum/

Overview from their website:

The Forum is sponsored by the National Center for Education Statistics of the U.S. Department of Education and is committed to improving the quality, comparability, and usefulness of elementary and secondary education data, while remaining sensitive to data burden concerns. Forum members include representatives from state education agencies, local education agencies, the federal government, and other organizations with an interest in education data. Our purpose is to plan, recommend, and implement strategies for building an education data system that will support local, state, and national efforts to improve public and private education throughout the United States.

During the two days, we had presentations from key planners and implementors, for example:

• Common Data Standards Initiative by Nancy J. Smith, NCES, U.S. Department of Education
• Linking Early Childhood and Postsecondary Education to PK-12 by Elizabeth Laird, Data Quality Campaign and Hans L’Orange, State Higher Education Executive Officers
• Linking Student and Teacher Data  by George Noell, Louisiana Department of Education
• State Fiscal Stabilization Fund (SFSF) Metrics and Race to the Top Pane:l Cathy Solomon, Office of the Deputy Secretary, U.S. Department of Education; Kathy Gosa, Kansas State Department of Education; Irma Jones, Tennessee Department of Education

The forum addressed may issues, such as common data standards, the linkage of PK-12 data with early education childhood and postsecondary education, the linkage of student and teacher data, Race to the Top and State Fiscal Stabilization Fund data requirements, crime and violence data, data privacy, elementary and middle school course codes, website accessibility, NCES’s recent work, and more. It seeme, to me, that the topic that rose to the front during many discussions was the “linking of teacher performance to student achievement”.  This is one of those items that sounds great until you get to the knitty-gritty of gathering good data.

I serve as a member of the Tech Standing Committee and am always overwhelmed with the wealth of knowledge and deep thinking that comes from their meetings.  One of the Committee working groups will be publishing their next guide: Section 508 Accessibility.  This should prove to be extremely useful to all in the field.

Looking forward to the summer meeting at the end of July in Washington, D.C.