Assessing National Data on Education.

Overview & Synopsis

This paper applies questions of coverage, quality and linkages to the current collection of national statistics on education at the preprimary, elementary/secondary, and higher education levels. The main questions raised at the preprimary level pertain to availability of programs, standards, and family-school interaction. At the elementary/secondary level, the policy debate revolves around questions relating to educational improvement, resources effectiveness, and equity. National data bases provide little help in answering these questions, and the quality of data varies. At the higher education level, data sources are considered as they pertain to student aid, efficiency, educational value, and role of higher education. The following recommendations are made for improving the national data: (1) eliminate low priority data items; (2) identify and fill information gaps on a priority basis in areas of major policy interest; (3) establish an office of quality control; (4) give highest priority to improving quality of elementary/secondary education data; (5) modernize procedures for data collection; (6) investigate the feasibility of linking the most costly data collection systems in the Department of Education; (7) initiate discussions with representatives of other agencies to coordinate data collection; (8) in developing questionnaires, consider those variables that have been shown to be most important to outcomes; (9) establish an education data bank to improve survey consistency across data bases and over time; and (10) keep expectations high. (JAZ)