Connecticut Department of Education Longitudinal Data System

The Connecticut State Department of Education (CSDE) implemented the student-level Public School Information System (PSIS) in October 2002. In October 2005 a unique student identifier was incorporated to facilitate the process of linking student information across several databases. Since then the CSDE has been working with an outside vendor to enhance the PSIS to more effectively track the educational experience of students in the local school districts. The CSDE has also begun redesigning several of its stovepipe data collections in order to leverage the student data in PSIS to improve the accuracy of the data submitted by the LEAs and to reduce duplication of effort on the LEA side. 

While several improvements have either occurred or are in process, the PSIS does not capture information about the courses in which students enroll, and their completion of these courses, and the teachers who taught the courses. This information will become increasingly important as Connecticut moves toward implementing a secondary reform plan, part of which requires students to enroll in specific courses in order to graduate. An additional limitation is the inability to share PK-12 data with postsecondary institutions and labor in order to track the experience of Connecticut students once they have left the PK 12 system. If both of these limitations are addressed, Connecticut would be well poised to answer questions about the effectiveness of its secondary school reform initiative and about how well prepared students are to enter college or university. 

This proposal seeks funding for two overarching initiatives; 

1) a student/schedule/ teacher module; and 2) an interoperability framework for data sharing between PK-12, higher education, and labor. 

The outcomes of these two projects will be the creation of a data infrastructure that will enable the following: 

1. The monitoring of the implementation of secondary school reform to determine if students are indeed enrolling in the classes needed to graduate; 
   1. Provide more accurate accountability reporting for the Federal Perkins Program; 
      1. Evaluating if students have been well prepared by their public school experience by determining the extent to which students need remediation upon entering the postsecondary system; 
      2. Answer research questions about course taking patterns and their relationship to student outcome measures; 
      3. Evaluate the impact of students’ experiences in both secondary and postsecondary education on their experiences in the workforce.