Virginia Department of Education

The Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) has received ever-increasing requests from legislative staff, education advocates, and Local Education Agency (LEA) personnel to access data through VLDS to understand and improve educational outcomes for all students. However, access to Virginia Longitudinal Data System (VLDS) for these policymakers and stakeholder groups has been extremely limited because the system was not originally designed with their needs in mind.

The Virginia Department of Education and the University of Virginia will examine student equity of access to instructional opportunities and educational outcomes and describe how Virginia's responses to COVID-19 may have influenced equity in student outcomes and differences in teacher outcomes across student characteristics.

The proposed project has two goals: (1) to ensure research using data from VLDS is reflective of policy-relevant, equity-focused research questions and (2) to increase access to and transparency of VLDS data to a broader audience of education stakeholders.

This project supported the Virginia Department of Education's (VDOE) efforts to systematically measure school climate and working conditions, provide targeted technical assistance to schools to improve their school climate and working conditions concerns, and incorporate school climate metrics into Virginia's school accountability system in order to help VDOE gain a better understanding of how school climate is related to student education outcomes.

The Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) —in partnership with the Office of the Governor, the State Council of Higher Education (SCHEV), the Virginia Community College System, the Virginia Information Technologies Agency, and Virginia’s workforce agencies— proposes to expand on the advancements we have made through our current Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) grant.

The Virginia Department of Education proposes to use this grant opportunity to leverage our existing accomplishments in building a longitudinal data system by requesting resources that will take us to the "next level" for both policy-makers and instructional decision makers.