Federal Programs Information on School and School District Universe Files. Improving Universe Data on Schools and School Districts

Specific issues to be resolved, prior to including federal programs information on school and school district universe files, are identified and discussed as part of the Education Data Improvement Project of the Council of Chief State School Officers. Goals of this Project are to describe state collection of data elements currently in the common core of data of the National Center for Education Statistics and to present recommendations to make the common core of data more comprehensive, comparable, and timely. These profiles represent a sampling of individual state data collection practices in isolation from other states. They are continually being revised. Analysis will result in matrices comparing, state-by-state, the practices reflected in the profile. Profiles contain information about six federally-funded programs: (1) Chapter 1 of the Education Consolidation and Improvement Act; (2) Bilingual Education; (3) Migrant Education; (4) Special Education; (5) Vocational Education; and (6) Food and Nutrition Services. They include the state definitions of the programs and a summary of data that the states currently collect. The profiles and recommendations to improve them are summarized in three tables. Five additional tables give the state-by-state components of definitions used in the school and school district universe files. (SLD)