Data Quality Initiatives

With a growing national focus on data and accountability to help students succeed in education and careers, collecting high-quality data and sharing it across different agencies is more important than ever.

Below you can learn more about several of the initiatives in which ACTE is involved. ACTE has also prepared a glossary of key data quality and sharing initiatives to help you keep track.

Current Activities:

  • Certification Data Exchange Project:
    ACTE, in cooperation with a number of national and state partners, supported a project to expand and improve data exchange between industry certification organizations and state longitudinal data systems. The project wrapped in 2017.
  • Workforce Data Quality Campaign: This campaign calls for policymakers in Washington, DC and in the state capitals to take a more inclusive approach to education data quality efforts, including the diversity of students and workers and the range of education and labor market outcomes that comprise our nation’s human capital strategy.
  • Workforce Credentials Coalition: The California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office and Doing What Matters for Jobs and the Economy have teamed up with the North Carolina Community College System to lead this coalition toward establishing joint data standards, data sharing agreements and a single data repository, so that information on certification outcomes can be more easily shared with community colleges across the nation.
  • Institute for Higher Education Policy Postsecondary Data Collaborative: IHEP has taken a leadership role in accelerating the momentum building around the need for higher-quality postsecondary education data through the PostsecData Collaborative.
  • WorkCred Research Advisory Council: An affiliate of the American National Standards Institute, Workcred’s mission is to strengthen workforce quality by improving the credentialing system, ensuring its ongoing relevance and preparing employers, workers, educators and governments to use it effectively.
    • Lumina Connecting Credentials Initiative: Lumina Foundation and over 80 co-sponsoring organizations are calling for ways to transform our nation’s highly diverse and fragmented credentialing system into one that is student-centered and learning-based.

Prior Activities:

  • School Codes for the Exchange of Data: In fall 2012, ACTE led a project, in coordination with the Department of Education and the National Association of State Directors of CTE Consortium, with Sharon Enright from the Ohio Department of Education providing oversight, to revise course titles, descriptions and classifications within the National Center for Education Statistics Secondary School Course Code Classification System: School Codes for the Exchange of Data (SCED).
  • State Perkins Accountability Congress: The State Perkins Accountability Congress brought together stakeholders from secondary and postsecondary CTE from each state, as well as organizations such as ACTE, to discuss and come to consensus on common performance measure definitions to be recommended for the reauthorization of Perkins. A final report released in February 2013 describes detailed suggestions for future Perkins performance indicators.