Improving the Capacity of the National Education Data System to Address Equity Issues

Book excerpt: "A Guide to Improving the National Education Data System" (1990) makes 36 recommendations for improving data collection in the areas of student/background characteristics, education resources, school processes, and student outcomes. This paper uses the framework of the "Guide" to review issues raised in "Education Counts," a recent examination of the nation's capacity to measure and monitor educational change, focusing specifically on data needed to address issues of educational equity with respect to student populations. The first section discusses current equity and at-risk policy issues and the data needed to address them. The second section looks more closely at the data currently available to address these items. The third section examines limitations in current data collections for addressing equity issues, and a fourth section provides specific recommendations for ways to improve the national data system to address equity issues. Recommendations center on the creation of student-based record systems, the linkage of elementary and secondary systems, the development of new measures and indicators, and the reporting of data according to student characteristics. (Contains 10 figures, 2 appendixes, and 60 references.) (SLD)