Personnel Exchange

General Information

The Personnel Exchange Network provides travel funds for state or local education agency staff to visit other education organizations in order to share knowledge about education data issues. The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) has provided support for personnel exchanges for more than two decades through funding from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) of the U.S. Department of Education. These exchanges enabled state education agency (SEA) staffs to share knowledge about education data issues such as solving problems in computerizing data systems and concerns about data elements on students, staff, and schools.

Goals of Personnel Exchange

1. Promote wider use of successful methods of education data collection, maintenance, reporting, and use; and
   
2. Share news of effective data collection and reporting technology practices among states, school districts, and other organizations.

The specific activity areas to which these goals apply are:

1. Student Data Systems
2. Student Identifiers
3. Confidentiality of Data
4. Data Quality
5. Data Definitions
6. Data Warehousing
7. Web Reporting
8. SIF (Schools Interoperability Framework) Implementation Issues

Travel funding is provided to support either an outside expert's visit to the applicant agency's site or the applicant agency staff's visit to the expert's site. Each personnel exchange may involve a team of up to three persons who will travel and complete the activity within three days. Funding and assistance are provided for up to ten exchanges under this program in each year.

Examples of Past Exchanges

A few examples of personnel exchanges in the past years include:

Staff of the Oklahoma Department of Education traveled to Mississippi to learn from their recent experiences in the design, development, training, implementation and support of the Web-based Mississippi Student Information System.

Expert personnel from the Florida Department of Education visited Oklahoma to share their experience in areas such as student identifiers, data content collected, timing of submissions, staffing levels, staff retention, data quality checks and legal challenges.

General Questions:

Contact: Deborah Newby from CCSSO at (202) 336-7052
Contact: Ghedam Bairu from NCES at (202) 502-7304

Application process for the Personnel Exchange.

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Publications of the National Forum on Education Statistics do not undergo the formal review required for products of the National Center for Education Statistics. The information and opinions published here are the product of the National Forum on Education Statistics and do not necessarily represent the policy or views of the U.S. Department of Education or the National Center for Education Statistics.