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, while the School District Finance Survey and the National Public Education Financial Survey are the fiscal components. These surveys are reported annually by state education agencies (SEAs) through the efforts of state CCD coordinators. Participation in the CCD is voluntary.
Data for CCD surveys 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 for anomalous data is provided by the state, NCES will change the data value. For example, NCES will replace a reported total with the sum of detail in cases where the sum of detail exceeds a reported total. NCES will also change a value to "not available" if data values are not plausible (e.g., 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 CCD surveys. NCES attempts to correct missing data first by drawing on other sources. For example, if the number of teachers was missing in the State Nonfiscal Survey, but reported in the Local Education Agency Survey, the state-level number would be summed from the state's local education agencies. 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, file documentation identifies all instances in which data were summed or imported from other CCD surveys or outside sources. These procedures to correct for missing data are used for any CCD data item and for all three CCD nonfiscal surveys.
If missing data cannot be corrected by summing from other CCD surveys or using alternate external sources, NCES imputes some missing items (i.e., replaces a nonresponse with a plausible value) in the State Nonfiscal Survey. (See below for information on imputation procedures.) Data are not imputed in the Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe Survey or the Local Education Agency Universe Survey.
If information is missing for some but no more than 15 percent of states across the 50 states and District of Columbia, NCES calculates totals and identifies them as "reporting states" totals (rather than totals for the United States). Precise information about the extent of missing data is included in the documentation for the State Nonfiscal Survey of Public Elementary/Secondary Education, which can be accessed at http://nces.ed.gov/ccd/stnfis.asp.
NCES imputes and adjusts some reported values in the State Nonfiscal Survey of Public Elementary/Secondary Education to create data files that more accurately reflect student and staff counts and to improve comparability among states. Imputations and adjustments are performed on data from the 50 states and District of Columbia only. Although no imputations are made to data in the high school graduate or other high school completer categories, the numbers in these categories are modified to prevent identification of any individual. No adjustments or imputations are performed on race/ethnicity data for any state.
Imputations provide plausible values in cases in which the missing value is not reported, indicating that subtotals for the category are underreported. An imputation assigns a value to the missing item, and subtotals containing this item increase by the amount of the imputation.
Adjustments are corrections in cases in which a value reported for one item contains a value for one or more additional items not reported elsewhere. For example, a state may not differentiate between kindergarten teachers and prekindergarten teachers, reporting “missing” for prekindergarten teachers and a value representing the count of staff for both categories as kindergarten teachers. NCES adjusts these two responses by reducing the amount reported for kindergarten teachers and adding that amount to prekindergarten teachers.
Values are imputed or adjusted for some missing items in the State Nonfiscal Survey of Public Elementary/Secondary Education. All imputed or adjusted values in the tables are footnoted, and such values are never used in the imputation or adjustment of another value. Totals and subtotals in tables are footnoted if one or more items in the total or subtotal are imputed or adjusted.
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 Mariana Islands, or the U.S. Virgin Islands. In cases where not all but at least 85 percent of the 50 states and the District of Columbia provide a response for a data item, a "reporting states" total is presented. See "Missing data" (above) for more information.
Agreement across survey levels.
Some students receive a public education outside a local school district or school (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 or homebound students, for example, may be reported in the membership for a regular school district but not in 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 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 collapse 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 in the local education agency and school surveys are not disaggregated and redistributed.
High school completers.
The types of high school completion credentials available to students vary by state policy. For example, in some states the only type of completion available is a regular diploma; in others, a variety of completion credentials are awarded, from a regular diploma to a certificate of attendance. For this reason, caution should be used when comparing state totals for diploma recipients.
The category of other high school completers includes certificates of attendance or completion. It does not include high school equivalency credentials such as those based on the General Education Development (GED) test. "Not applicable" is accepted as a valid response for other high school completers, as some states do not offer this credential.
Confidentiality protection of high school completer data.
Under some conditions, it might be possible to identify a student who was enrolled in the 12th grade and who failed to receive a regular diploma at the end of that school year. For example, if a school district had only ten 12th-grade White, non-Hispanic students in 2004–05 and no White, non-Hispanic diploma recipients, it might be assumed that all of these students failed to graduate. (This would have to be an assumption, because the CCD cannot distinguish students who fail to graduate from those who transfer out of a school district or state.)
In order to prevent the identification of any 12th-grade student who fails to receive a regular diploma, high school completion data are modified, either by changing some completion data to missing or by increasing the reported number of diploma recipients. These changes result in a minimal loss of data.
Averaged freshman graduation rate (AFGR).
The AFGR provides an estimate of the percentage of high school students who graduate on time. The rate uses averaged student enrollment data (to estimate the size of an incoming freshman class) and aggregate counts of the number of diplomas awarded 4 years later. The incoming freshman class size is estimated by summing the enrollment in 8th grade in one year, 9th grade in the next year, and 10th grade in the year after and then dividing by 3. The averaging is intended to account for prior-year retentions in the 9th grade.
PDF & Related Info
Contact
