Texas's statewide longitudinal data system has been in place since 2011, and it has met many of our initial goals, like creating a shared data warehouse, implementing LEA-facing student identifiers, and expanding the availability of data to educators and the public. The Texas Education Agency (TEA) is proud of what it has accomplished in terms of unifying and standardizing data collections and creating a stable and intuitive platform with an ability to evolve.

All public and charter school students and staff in Texas—as well as some students in private prekindergartens—have TEA Unique Identifiers. All 1,200+ local education agencies report education data through our SLDS platform, the Texas Student Data System (TSDS). TEA has an LEA-facing operational data store (ODS) that is the source for LEA data for all TSDS submissions, and we are on the cusp of fulfilling a longstanding goal by "de-siloing" the ODS through the adoption of the Ed-Fi 3.x data standards. Our longitudinal warehouse powers reports that cover early learning through post-secondary and workforce data, and we have been successfully exchanging data with the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) for fifteen years and the Texas Workforce Commission (TWC) for nearly a decade.

However, as TSDS has expanded and technology has changed, the system has developed new needs. These needs align well with the Infrastructure Priority of the SLDS 2019 grant application, as we want to strengthen our infrastructure to improve the usability and usefulness of education data, capitalize on recent legislation to link new data sources to produce public-facing reports, and support our implementation of the latest version of the national Ed-Fi data standards.

For this grant, TEA is proposing the following outcomes, in partnership with THECB and TWC:

Outcome 1: Upgrade validation processes and framework
Outcome 2: Create a parallel environment and integrate downstream systems
Outcome 3: Create a pilot program for LEAs and ESCs
Outcome 4: Improve reporting performance and scalability
Outcome 5: Connect private PK student performance to current K–12 outcomes
Outcome 6: Connect student data to educator preparation performance
Outcome 7: Create Education Research Center resources

In addition, TEA plans to request the extra $250,000 available with SLDS 2019 to hire a Harvard Center for Education Policy Research fellow to work with TEA program areas on making use of the new school-level poverty measure.