Forum Guide to Decision Support Systems: A Resource for Educators—The Decision Support System Literacy Task Force released the Forum Guide to Decision Support Systems: A Resource for Educators in September 2006. The document was developed to remedy the lack of reliable, objective information available to the education community about decision support systems. It is hoped that it will help readers better understand what decision support systems are, how they are configured, how they operate, and how they might be implemented in an education institution.

Forum Guide to the Privacy of Student Information: A Resource for Schools— This Forum publication is the product of the FERPA Toolkit Action Plan Team sponsored by the Forum's Policies, Procedures, and Implementation (PPI) Committee. It was written to help school and local education agency staff better understand and apply the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), a federal law that protects privacy interests of parents and students in student education records. As such, it defines terms such as "education records" and "directory information" and offers guidance for developing appropriate privacy policies and information disclosure procedures related to military recruiting, parental rights and annual notification, videotaping, online information, media releases, surveillance cameras, and confidentiality concerns related specifically to health-related information.

Forum Guide to Elementary/Secondary Virtual Education—The Virtual/Distance Education Task Force produced this document to align, modify, and develop definitions of "traditional" education data elements to better meet the information and reporting needs unique to the virtual education learning environment. The document also provides recommendations for collecting accurate, comparable, and useful data about virtual education in an elementary/secondary education setting. As such, it highlights specific data elements related to the delivery, management, and oversight of virtual education. It also presents policy considerations related to managing information about virtual education and illustrates how complex issues related to virtual education data play out in a real-world setting. The project was a collaborative effort among Forum members, the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA), and the Schools Interoperability Framework Association (SIFA).

Accounting for Every Student: A Taxonomy for Standard Student Exit Codes—This "best practice" guide presents an exhaustive and mutually exclusive exit code taxonomy that accounts, at any single point in time, for all students enrolled (or previously enrolled) in a particular school or district. It is based on exit code systems in use in state education agencies across the nation and a thorough review of existing literature on the subject. The document also reviews common challenges and good practices to collecting exit codes data, as well a how to distinguish among common high school completion credentials awarded throughout the nation.

http://nces.ed.gov/forum/data_modeling.asp—This page presents three papers about developing a comprehensive PK-12 data model, as prepared by the Schools Interoperability Framework Association under contract to the National Center for Education Statistics. These papers serve as background materials for the Forum's new PK-12 Data Model Task Force.

http://nces.ed.gov/forum/fed_register.asp—This page presents guidance about using the Federal Register, the official daily publication for rules, proposed rules, and notices of Federal agencies and organizations. It also highlights recent notices posted to the Federal Register that may be of particular interest to Forum members.

Data Quality Curriculum Task Force
The Data Quality Curriculum Task Force is developing a training tool for staff professional development based on the Forum Guide to Building a Culture of Quality Data. The task force expects to produce multiple frameworks, lesson plans, and instructional materials for local education agencies to use during staff development activities. These resources are expected to be available by February 2007. For more information about the progress of the Data Quality Curriculum Task Force, visit http://nces.ed.gov/forum/data_quality_curr.asp.

PK-12 Data Model Task Force
The PK-12 Data Model Task Force was officially formed at the Summer 2006 Forum Meeting. It is charged with developing a conceptual and logical education data model that focuses on teaching, learning, and school district operations. These models will include data elements, categories of data elements, education processes, definitions and semantics, and relationships among data elements. The task force will also develop a methodology for utilizing, maintaining, and sharing information about the data model so that it will have maximum utility for stakeholders. For more information about the progress of the PK-12 Data Model Task Force, visit http://nces.ed.gov/forum/pk12_data_model.asp.