Related Initiatives

National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Handbooks

The NCES Handbooks includes a vast collection of basic data elements and option sets in the K12 domain. The resource’s stated purpose is “to provide a comprehensive listing of all data elements that might be needed for decisionmaking related to managing an education system, reporting to state and federal education agencies, and computing indicators of school effectiveness.” The data elements of the Handbooks are updated annually and are organized into seven levels, which include Class, Intermediate Educational Unit (IEU), Local Education Agency (LEA), School, Staff, State Education Agency (SEA), and Student. For each data element, a definition is provided along with an option set, whenever applicable. As a “standards” resource, the Handbooks offer a catalogue of data elements, definitions and code sets. The Handbooks also include the School Codes for the Exchange of Data (SCED) and a number of the standards provided by Forum publications. Additionally, the vast majority of the Handbooks’ terms, definitions, and code sets have been incorporated into the Schools Interoperability Framework specifications (see below) as well as the National Education Data Model (see below).
https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20130214182750/http://nces.ed.gov/programs/handbook/

National Education Data Model (NEDM)

The National Education Data Model (NEDM) provides general data guidelines, depicting the relationships between a large collection of data elements collected and used in PK-20 education. Specifically, it focuses on the granular data items, attributes and relationships associated with teaching, learning, and business operations at the school and district levels. For instance, the NEDM will tell you that a student, who has a name, physical address, phone number, displacement status, and other attributes, receives services from a teacher and participates in a class, which has a room number within a building, which is a capital asset defined in the NCES Handbooks, and so on. The Model currently includes all of the elements contained in the NCES Handbooks, and also overlaps considerably with the collection of data elements in the Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF) specifications. A number of the Forum standards are also included. The Model includes elements from postsecondary education, which are included in the Postsecondary Electronic Standards Council (PESC) standards.
https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20130214182750/http://nces.ed.gov/forum/datamodel/index.aspx

National Forum on Education Statistics

The National Forum on Education Statistics (the Forum) has long been a leading resource for education data standards, focusing on issues of data standardization and basic data elements. The Forum, an organization of state and local education agencies, the federal government and other organizations, has produced a number of publications that provide voluntary, best practice recommendations guides containing data standards, including definitions, codes and education data system components. Thus far, these products have covered areas such as crime, violence and discipline, attendance, exits, finance, and facilities, and student displacement. Many of the Forum’s standards have been incorporated into the NCES Handbooks, the NEDM, and the SIF specifications.
https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20130214182750/http://nces.ed.gov/forum/

Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF) Implementation Specifications

The SIF Association is a nonprofit organization, which includes as members local and state K-12 education agencies, software vendors, and others in the education community. The organization has created and continues to enhance a vendor-neutral “technical blueprint” for exchanging K-12 data. SIF defines suggested standards for naming, defining, and formatting data elements, as well as the technical specifications to facilitate interaction between software applications to enable applications from different developers to easily interact and exchange data. SIF also includes a data model, depicting the relationships among the data. SIF includes data elements in various areas such as student information, assessment, facilities, finances, food services, transportation, and professional development. Over 90% of the K12-specific portions of CEDS V3 align with the SIF Implementation Specification version 2.6.
https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20130214182750/http://www.sifinfo.org/us/index.asp

Postsecondary Electronic Standards Council (PESC)

PESC is an organization of colleges and universities; professional and commercial organizations; data, software and service providers; nonprofit organizations and associations; and state and federal government agencies. Among the organization’s missions is to create data standards to facilitate the exchange of data among postsecondary institutions. As a “standards” resource, PESC provides range of standards for higher education, cataloguing data elements, definitions, and code sets, and specifying technical requirements. The PESC standards for student transcripts have been cross-walked to the SIF standards for student records to ensure comparability and completeness. PESC and SIFA continue to work together to promote interoperability. K-12 education agencies may use PESC standards to enable data sharing with postsecondary institutions about students bound for or enrolled in Higher Education.
https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20130214182750/http://www.pesc.org/

EDFacts

EDFacts is a data initiative of the U.S. Department of Education (USED) that compiles national K-12 education data by consolidating a number of previously separate federal collections. By combining these collections, EDFacts is intended to centralize performance and other aggregate data for decision- and policymaking. The aim is to streamline data submissions to the federal government and eliminate redundancies, thus easing the burden on state education agencies. Data collected for EDFacts include student and staff demographics, program participation, student performance and completion, school and district directory data, revenues and expenditures, school choice options, and other information. As a “standards” resource, EDFacts provides data elements, definitions and code sets. USED also publishes technical specifications for EDFacts to guide the file submission process. As much of the data collected by states are used to meet federal reporting requirements, the standards provided by EDFacts are commonly adopted by the states to facilitate compliance. All of the EDFacts data elements have been incorporated into the NCES Handbooks, the Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF) specifications, and the National Education Data Model (NEDM). The Education Data Exchange Network (EDEN) is the portal through which states submit their data to the U.S. Department of Education.
https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20130214182750/http://www2.ed.gov/about/inits/ed/edfacts/index.html

Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS)

IPEDS is a system of interrelated postsecondary surveys conducted annually by the U.S. Department’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). IPEDS gathers information from every college, university, and technical and vocational institution that participates in the federal student financial aid programs. The Higher Education Act of 1965, as amended, requires that institutions that participate in federal student aid programs report data on enrollments, program completions, graduation rates, faculty and staff, finances, institutional prices, and student financial aid. These data are made available to students and parents through the College Navigator college search Web site and to researchers and others through the IPEDS Data Center. IPEDS provides basic data needed to describe and analyze trends in postsecondary education in the United States, in terms of the numbers of students enrolled, staff employed, dollars expended, and degrees earned. Congress, federal agencies, state governments, education providers, professional associations, private businesses, media, students and parents, and others rely on IPEDS data for this basic information on postsecondary institutions.
https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20130214182750/http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds