Visualizing Equity: Supporting Continuity in Educational Opportunities for Students with Additional Needs Using Virginia's Cross-Sector Longitudinal Data System

The Virginia Longitudinal Data System (VLDS) is a cross-sector, federated data system that has been providing de-identified longitudinal student data to researchers for the past six years to improve educational outcomes for students in the Commonwealth. While the system works as intended for researchers, VLDS is limited in its capacity to provide data in a meaningful way to other educational stakeholders, particularly legislators and local practitioners. To meet the equity commitments established for the recently launched Virginia is for All Learners equity campaign, the VDOE needs to ensure robust data on equity is available to policymakers, practitioners, families, and other stakeholders to understand the conditions that currently exist in their state, divisions, and schools.

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. The VDOE intends to meet the first goal by strengthening the relationships between the research community, agency staff, local practitioners, and state legislators through a collaboratively developed research agenda and annual forums on longitudinal data. In partnership with VDSS, VDOE intends to meet the second goal by developing and deploying an expanded portfolio of data visualizations, dashboards, and platforms powered by data available through VLDS. The VDOE is also interested in participating in the school-level poverty measures study.

Outcomes: The VDOE anticipates five outcomes from this project: (1) an equity-focused research agenda for VLDS and (2) an established longitudinal data research community that, in tandem, will align future research projects to VDOE's equity commitments; (3) a library of equity-focused visualizations tailored to the expressed information needs of policymakers and practitioners; and (4) an educational performance measures dashboard and (5) educational record exchange platform which together will support and maintain the educational stability for children and youth in foster care, whenever it is in their best interest to do so.