Appendix A: Methodology and Technical Notes

The CCD is a subset of the data collected through the Department of Education's EDFacts collection system. State Education Agencies (SEAs) annually submit over 100 data files through the EDFacts Submission System (ESS). The CCD universe files are based on the data provided in 9 of those files. Submission due dates for these files ranged from January 1, 2015 through May 30, 2015. Not all states were able to meet the initial due dates.

ESS checks submitted files for format and conducts some validation checks. Files that pass these initial checks are then passed to NCES for additional processing.

During the course of the SY 2014–15 collection, NCES moved the post-ESS data processing from the Census Bureau and Census' processing system, to EDFacts' Partner Support Center (PSC) and the new Data Management System (DMS). Census processed the initial submissions and produced exception reports which were provided to SEAs. In November of 2015, the responsibility for follow-up and issue resolution was transferred to PSC. Data issue identification and resolution relied primarily on the Census-generated issues report. However, some late submissions and re-submissions used the DMS to identify and resolve remaining issues. When errors in data were found, SEAs were encouraged to re-submit the data file through ESS. This provisional release of the CCD universe files is based on the submissions and re-submissions received through December 30, 2015 and is designated as '1a' in file names. Re-releases of these data files will be designated with an incremented release number (e.g., '2a').

In prior SY data files, geographic data were included with the CCD directory files. Those data are now processed and published separately by NCES' Education Demographic and Geographic Estimates (EDGE) program (see https://nces.ed.gov/programs/edge/ for more details).

When SEAs could not re-submit files to correct data problems, NCES made the corrections to the data directly. NCES' preference is to publish the data as reported by the SEAs. However, NCES makes some adjustments to the reported data for the following reasons.

• To set appropriate default values.
• To bring SEAs' definitions into conformity with NCES definitions (e.g., school typologies).
• To carry over corrections researched and resolved in prior years.
• To impute for missing values in state-level data.
• To suppress LEA or school-level enrollment or staff counts that are greatly inconsistent with prior year reports. This is done only if the SEA did not provide an explanation for the anomaly.
• To suppress high or low counts that might compromise confidential data.

More detailed explanations of the methodology used to collect these data and a glossary of CCD terms are available in the Documentation to the 2014–15 Common Core of Data (CCD) Universe Files (NCES 2016077).

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