The State Nonfiscal Survey of Public Elementary/Secondary Education, the Local Education Agency Universe Survey, and the Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe Survey are the nonfiscal components of the Common Core of Data (CCD) survey system. These surveys are reported annually by state education agencies (SEAs) through the efforts of State CCD Coordinators. Participation in the CCD is voluntary.
The data are collected from SEAs through an online reporting system. They are then processed, edited, and verified by the U.S. Census Bureau, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), and the Education Statistics Services Institute (ESSI) of the American Institutes for Research (AIR). The 2005–06 school year CCD collection opened on March 15, 2006 and closed on October 1, 2006.
Data quality.
Staff at NCES, the Census Bureau, and ESSI collaborate to edit all CCD data submissions and ask state CCD coordinators to correct or confirm any numbers that appear out of range when compared with other states' data or with the state's reports in previous years. If no explanation is forthcoming for anomalous data, NCES will change the value (example, replace a reported total with the sum of detail) or change it to "not available." For example, if the number of high school diploma recipients reported by a state is substantially greater than the number of 12th grade students in the previous year, and the state cannot explain this discrepancy, NCES will set the current year value for high school diploma recipients to not available.
Missing data.
Not all states collect and report all of the data items requested in the CCD surveys. NCES attempts to correct missing data first by drawing on other sources. For example, if the number of teachers was missing on the Local Education Agency Survey, but reported on the Public Elementary/Secondary School Survey, the agency-level number would be summed from the agency's schools. In some cases, a state is unable to report data during the collection period, but publishes them later, through a written report or website. NCES imports data from these other published sources to correct missing items. When this is done, table footnotes identify instances in which data were summed or imported from other CCD surveys or outside sources. These procedures are used for any data item, and for all of the three nonfiscal CCD surveys.
NCES imputes (replaces a nonresponse with a plausible value) some missing items in the State Nonfiscal Survey of Public Elementary/Secondary Education Survey, but does not impute missing items in the Public Elementary/ Secondary School Universe Survey or the Local Education Agency Universe Survey.
An individual state is considered to have missing data if an item is reported by less than 80 percent of its schools or agencies. If a state is missing 20 percent or more of its responses for a given data item in the school or local education agency surveys, the corresponding table cell is suppressed and no count is presented Because no item was missing for as many as 20 percent of the agencies in any state, no item was suppressed. Precise information about the extent of missing data is included in the documentation for the Local Education Agency Universe Survey 2005–06 file, which can be accessed at http://nces.ed.gov/ccd/pubagency.asp.
Missing data are treated differently across states and the District of Columbia as a whole than they are within individual states. When data are reported across states, if information is missing for no more than 15 percent of districts across the United States, NCES calculates totals and identifies them as totals for "reporting states," rather than for the United States, and column headings are labeled accordingly. Data that are suppressed because of underreporting are not included in "reporting states" totals. Because no state failed to report an item in 2005–06, none of the tables shows a "reporting states" total.
Totals.
Totals reported in the tables are limited to the 50 states and the District of Columbia. They do not include data from the Bureau of Indian Education, Department of Defense dependents schools (overseas and domestic), Puerto Rico, or the other jurisdictions of American Samoa, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands, or the U.S. Virgin Islands.
School and agency operational and membership status.
In order to ensure continuity over time, the CCD includes schools and agencies that may not be operating during the school year reported. "Inactive" agencies are those that are closed temporarily, with the intention that they will be reopened, and they retain their original NCES identification code. "Closed" agencies are reported for one year after they have been closed. "Future" agencies are planned, but have not yet begun to operate.
Some operational schools or agencies may legitimately not report students. The CCD allows a student to be reported for only a single school or agency. A vocational school or a local education agency operating only vocational schools may provide classes for students from a number of regular schools or school districts. In this case, the students are usually reported in the membership of their school district of record, and the local education agency operating the vocational school may show no student membership.
Agreement across survey levels.
Some students receive a public education outside a regular school district (for example, they may attend a state-operated residential school). Some students in a regular school district may not be served by a school. Hospital-homebound students, for example, may be reported in the membership for a regular school district but not for any of the district's schools. The numbers of students and staff shown in the tables for any CCD First Look report are derived from the survey represented in that report. Therefore, the numbers may differ across reports. The numbers reported in the State Nonfiscal Survey of Public Elementary/Secondary Education Survey are considered the official statistics for a state.
Staff counts.
All staff counts (including teachers) are reported in full-time equivalent (FTE) units. This is the amount of time required to perform an assignment stated as a proportion of a full-time position. It is computed by dividing the amount of time an individual is employed by the time normally required for a full-time position.
State agencies vary in their staff data collection and reporting systems, with resulting variations across states. Several states collapsed two or more categories of staff into one. In these cases, for the state nonfiscal data only, NCES disaggregates this number by distributing the reported number of staff across the several categories based on the average distribution of these staff in the reporting states. Staff counts from the local education agency and school surveys are not disaggregated and redistributed.
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