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 proposed project seeks to generate state-policy-focused research and evaluation projects and data use deliverables of VLDS, with the goal of transforming VLDS from a repository of data into an invaluable resource for informing researchers and decision-makers as they craft public policy. While the federated model of VLDS is operational and has grown into a partnership of thirteen Virginia state agencies, VLDS is still limited in its capacity to serve some key end users and stakeholder groups. There is a great need for the use of VLDS to promote actions to dismantle systemic data divides, to impact social issues of political and practical importance, to address critical knowledge and information gaps, and bring multi-sector perspectives into state policy development and processes optimization.
The proposed project has four goals: (1) Use VLDS to build capacity in the interdisciplinary collaboration and critical exploration of research and evaluation in a way that is reflective of relevant state policy; (2) Create new, consumable data analytics-based products and reports, for example, contextualized and interactive visualizations that are driven by pressing state policy questions; (3) Develop and scale a cutting-edge comprehensive system that supports responsive intra- and interagency VLDS linkages of data, within and across data systems (such as, LEA to SEA data transmission), data sectors (such as, pre-K, K-12, and P20 to Workforce data), and data sources (such as, community colleges, Virginia employment commission, social services, and health professions) to equip stakeholders with robust data to inform policy and practice; and (4) Build, disseminate, cultivate visibility, and accessibility of VLDS data visualizations/reports to engage new end users, such as state legislators, school divisions and schools, and broader stakeholder groups. The VDOE is also interested in participating in the development of open-source data use project built upon the Common Education Data Standards (CEDS) and within the CEDS Open-Source Community (OSC).
Project Outcomes: The VDOE anticipates seven outcomes from this project: (1) Establish a statepolicy-focused research and evaluation consortium composed of state universities, legislators, state and local decision-makers, and other stakeholders; (2) Create a library of state-policy-focused visualizations that can transform VLDS data into insights to assist policymakers and practitioners taking data-informed actions; (3) Develop a new series of Canvas courses, in tandem with other outreach efforts, to enhance the data visualization capacity within VDOE; (4) Develop workforce navigation dashboards to include health professions; (5) Modernize the data collection process for transmitting data from LEA to SEA; (6) Develop new data infrastructure features including a data asset inventory, a metadata repository, and a data mart; and (7) Develop a repository of reports that are visible and accessible to new end users, in particular, Virginia’s school administrators and educators.
