• Introduction
• Recent Issues With the CCD
• Policy Applications of the CCD
• Conclusion

The interests of sound policies and decisions for governing public K-12 education in the United States are well served by The Common Core of Data (CCD), which is administered by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The CCD is a good example of the critical importance of effective collaboration and partnerships between local, state, and federal levels of government. The basic data that define public schools in the United States exist because local school districts, state education agencies, and the U.S. Department of Education work together to establish common definitions, maintain regular data collection and reporting on core measures, and uphold policies on accurate, honest data.

The critical role of the CCD system for education policies at each level of our education system cannot be overestimated. The Department of Education has monitored some of the data elements of the CCD since the Department's inception in 1867. The current CCD system has experienced change and will experience further rapid change. Three main points on the uses of the CCD in education policy are emphasized in this commentary.

• The CCD offers important building blocks for education decisions as well as key starting points for other education surveys and data systems at all levels.
• The CCD depends on timely cooperation among educators and managers at each level of public education, and the mutual dependence underlying the common system must be recognized by parties at each level for the system to function effectively.
• Movement toward an electronic integrated data system will incorporate the current functions of the CCD and significantly expand the usefulness of the data currently reported.

The data collections contributing to the CCD cover the most basic elements that describe education in the United States, including student enrollments, teachers, demographic characteristics, schools, revenues, and expenditures. School systems across the country play an active part in ensuring that the data meet definitions and specifications established through the leadership of NCES. Over the past decade, improvements have been made that have strengthened the CCD system. Regarding the usefulness of CCD information for education policy, several issues can be identified.

Since the 1980s, one of the emphases for the CCD and other NCES data collections has been increasing the reliability and consistency of data. Under the leadership of Emerson Elliot, former NCES Commissioner, the statistics provided by NCES have improved when judged against these criteria. Some areas of data collection within NCES have expanded, such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), longitudinal studies, and the Schools and Staffing Survey. The work with the CCD has focused primarily on improving the quality of data, although several data items have been added to the system from existing administrative records. In the early 1980s, NCES was criticized for the lack of consistency, completeness, and timeliness of data and statistics. In the past decade, NCES has worked with states and school districts in a cooperative, collaborative manner to improve the quality of data and has focused on ensuring that reports are available on a regular, timely schedule.

Educators, administrators, and policymakers may have some frustration with the CCD on the issues of usefulness and flexibility. For example, the CCD does not collect or report any data that can be disaggregated or analyzed by program, curriculum, or subject area. State agency users, professional organizations, and local educators could see enormous potential benefit in being able to track trends in full-time-equivalent (FTE) teachers by teaching assignment and size of school. A survey that was discontinued in the 1980s tracked secondary course enrollments, and many potential users would argue that these data would now be very important to have in common across states and districts. In the CCD, detailed data are collected by school for student characteristics such as race/ethnicity and poverty. The data can be accessed by school code, but they have not often been linked to educational measures from other national or state-level surveys such as student achievement or course enrollments. This is now an area of increased attention by NCES, and linking projects would increase the usefulness of the CCD.

Another issue is the method of reporting and availability of data. For example, the CCD collects detailed data at the district and state levels. Until the mid-1990s, aggregated statistics from the CCD were available in a small number of publications, notably the Digest of Education Statistics and The Condition of Education, as well as reports summarizing each of the CCD data collections' findings. Regular mailings were made to K-12 education agencies, postsecondary education institutions, and libraries. However, many other potential users often were not alerted to the availability of data, how they could be obtained, or how they might be used.

In the late 1990s, the advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web provided new avenues for CCD data to be made available to potential users, and methods of accessing data improved vastly. In addition, a series of short publications (Statistics in Brief) has alerted many educators and policymakers to the applications of the CCD series as well as other NCES surveys.

Access to data and information has become an expectation in American society and the world. The key products from the CCD need to continue to be disseminated in creative ways. New means of accessing these important data and statistics should become available as more users become attuned to methods of combining data from several sources for the purposes of educational policy analyses and producing reports on progress in our schools.

What are the strengths of the CCD as educators and policymakers look into the 21st century and consider the priorities for spending to improve the infrastructure of educational systems? From the viewpoint of policy applications, I would elaborate on three main points.

1. CCD as building blocks for education decisions and data systems. States, local systems, and the public depend on the common definitions and data collection procedures provided through the CCD. With the refocusing on data quality in the 1980s, NCES has invested in a number of consensus-building projects to ensure that K-12 education has a common statistical foundation. The CCD depends on state and local funding and data systems to collect data. However, NCES efforts ensure that data collection and reporting on central elements of educational systems—including school, teacher, administrator, student, graduate, and dropout—significantly ease the jobs of data managers at all levels and key users such as school boards and state legislatures.

Educational systems increasingly operate in a national market for students, teachers, and administrators. Decisions about school budgets and allocations in many jurisdictions involve the largest portion of spending of public tax dollars. Thus, decision makers have come to rely on comparable statistics from one school district to another and from one state to another. The CCD has proved an important starting point for data collection, analysis, and reporting by local school districts and states across the country. As school systems begin to redesign education data systems to meet the many new needs for data, NCES data definitions, coding systems, core data collections, and methods of aggregation and reporting provide the basic foundation for construction of education data and statistics.

The development of a common national dropout statistic in the 1990s provides a useful lesson in the role and relevance of the CCD. The reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Act in 1987 (the Hawkins-Stafford Act) called for a number of improvements in national education statistics. Among the provisions of the act was the creation of a comparable, reliable figure on the school dropout rate. Previously, school systems and states reported statistics on dropouts using a variety of methods of defining and counting a school "dropout" and various reference groups and periods of time to consider in computing a dropout "rate." Constituencies and interest groups relied on a particular definition or rate of dropout, with some methods of computation producing much higher or lower rates than others. NCES sought expert advice from highly respected statisticians and educators in finalizing a common definition and began requesting dropout statistics from states in the early 1990s. Through the CCD system and the deliberative consensus process for developing a new data collection element "in common" among the states, there has been a gradual movement to adopt the CCD definition of dropout. As a result, data systems used in states have adapted to require schools to track and report dropouts using the recommended procedures.

The NCES/CCD dropout statistic is not yet universal. Even when states agree to the new definition, some states and school districts do not have adequate data systems for collecting the data and conducting the necessary data edits and checks at the student level that are needed to meet the NCES/CCD definition. Thus, they are lacking the data needed for computing the standard rate. However, the common definition and reporting methods that were initiated, promoted, and supported through the CCD are likely to displace the noncomparable, local definitions of dropout. While the local definitions may meet some local reporting needs, they will not provide for methods of evaluating policies established to address the dropout problem that can be compared to policies and programs in other local systems and states.

2. CCD based on cooperation and mutual dependence. Many of the decisions regarding CCD surveys, definitions, and procedures have been made through cooperation with states and districts. The National Forum on Education Statistics, created a decade ago, consists of representatives from states and federal agencies involved with data collection and reporting of education statistics. Committees of the Forum have operated effectively to provide input into decisions about the CCD and other NCES data collection series. The Forum is part of the National Cooperative Education Statistics System of NCES with state departments of education. State education staff are supported with travel and expense funds for conferences and meetings with NCES staff, contractors, and others to plan and carry out the CCD. In turn, states collect and report data aggregated to the school, district, and state levels. NCES also sponsors a fellows program for state and district staff and provides some financial assistance to states to develop and improve their education data systems.

The cooperative approach to operation of the CCD has obvious benefits both for states and for NCES. It moves the data and statistics program toward a joint venture for data quality, accuracy, and timeliness. This approach does depend upon the cooperative intent in federal-state relations to ensure that data systems receive appropriate priority at the state and local levels. States still must allocate funds to support state-level design, management, and staffing of data systems, and they must provide leadership toward improving data quality with local school boards and administrators.

The cooperative system for the CCD has reaped real benefits in improving data quality and advancing the linkages between federal data collection and reporting and state and local data systems. Federal leadership of the cooperative system has been a plus. Two areas now need concentrated effort in the federal, state, and local partnership to improve the usefulness of the CCD for policy purposes. First, timeliness of state and district reporting needs to be improved. For example, CCD nonfiscal data are now available at the close of the following school year. High standards for quality and completeness have been applied, but problems in some states continue to slow the release of complete 50-state data sets. NCES and other components of the Department of Education need to continue to take a strong leadership role in assisting state and local systems to improve their data systems and maintain deadlines. States need to retain well-qualified staff who can maintain continuity in data collection and reporting and ensure that standards of quality and timeliness are upheld.

On a broader level, a second area of need for federal, state, and local partnership is to improve state and local reports with education statistics and indicators of progress. All states now produce state accountability or indicator reports, and a majority of the states report indicators at the district and school levels. Many of the models for reporting provide basic statistics on student and teacher demographics, education finance, and student achievement results. Relatively few states use a range of data sources and data collections to provide reports that are useful to a variety of audiences, including decision makers, teachers, administrators, and parents. An area for further federal-state collaboration, with guidance from the National Forum on Education Statistics, should be in the areas of reporting, data analysis, and uses of data.

3. Movement toward an electronic integrated data system. The cooperative effort toward data and data system improvement that has been carried out through the National Forum on Education Statistics may change the nature of how the CCD collects and reports information. In the early 1990s, a group of state education agency and school district staff joined with postsecondary admissions officers in a Forum project to develop a format for the electronic transmission of student records. This system exists today as SPEEDE/ExPRESS (Standardization of Postsecondary Education Electronic Data Exchange/Exchange of Permanent Records Electronically for Students and Schools). The transaction sets making up SPEEDE/ExPRESS are approved by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and thus serve as national standards for electronic information exchange. With representation from the Forum, NCES remains an active member of ANSI's subcommittee for electronic data interchange. Through this activity, NCES has recently joined with states, districts, and the private sector in the Schools Interoperability Framework project, an effort to develop extensible markup language (XML) formats for a range of information needs and data elements common at the school district level.

NCES has sponsored other pilot projects in the area of electronic data collection and transmission, often within the framework of the CCD data elements and always in collaboration with states and school districts. In the mid-1990s, several pairs of school districts that considered themselves "trading partners" for student enrollments tested the usefulness of SPEEDE/ExPRESS for forwarding migrant students' education records. Addressing another need, NCES sponsored work in several states belonging to the Southern Regional Education Board. The project developed a multistate collaborative system for collecting, analyzing, and reporting education staff data from multiple administrative record systems (such as data on teacher certification, continuing education, and retirement). It demonstrated a regional approach with the capacity to model teacher supply and demand for state policy planning.

NCES also developed and pilot-tested with states a system for harvesting CCD data from state record systems. Although never widely adopted, this early effort at electronic data aggregation and reporting addressed many of the issues that current electronic data systems have had to address, including data comparability, security in electronic transmission, hardware compatibility, and student privacy rights.

Only one CCD survey (the "State Nonfiscal Survey of Public Elementary/Secondary Education"), which reports state-level nonfiscal data, is a fully Web-based collection at this time. The remaining surveys may develop Web-based collection strategies in the near future. Because of the increasing need for timely information on education outcomes, other programs in the federal government are looking at the usefulness of existing state and local data for creating an integrated electronic reporting system.

For example, a current pilot project of the U.S. Department of Education's Planning and Evaluation Service is working with a small group of states to test an integrated approach to reporting from state data systems to federal education agencies. The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) has provided assistance and advice to the project. The goal of the initial two-state test with Nebraska and Oregon was to determine if data reporting needs for a number of elementary and secondary education programs could be met by accessing the data systems maintained by states. The Integrated Performance and Benchmarking System (IPBS) is now being expanded to six more states: Delaware, Illinois, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Texas. The IPBS, which is part of the Department's overall information improvement strategy, is envisioned as an Internet-based system for gathering data from states about federal program activities at the school and district levels. The approach being tested by IPBS represents a new model that could be applicable for future use with CCD collections. The National Forum on Education Statistics could provide needed review and discussion of the IPBS model for electronic collaboration on education data

From the perspective of policy use, the CCD is valuable not only as a source of information, but also as a model for federal-state cooperation that can improve data collection, quality, and use overall. If the past 10 years are a good predictor, the CCD survey system can be expected to grow and influence other collections in interesting ways over the next decade.