Archiving EDFacts at the Education Data Center
As many readers know, the past few months have been tumultuous in the education research space (and most other areas). Nearly half of all staff at the U.S. Department of Education (ED) have lost their jobs, with significant cuts to the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the research and data collection arm of ED. Millions of dollars for education research has been cut, and this has affected our work as well. We are very grateful for private individuals and to the Walton Family Foundation for their ongoing support.
In response to broader uncertainty related to federal datasets and whether or not they will remain available to the public, a number of organizations have worked to archive a tremendous amount of public data, including DataLumos. Archived datasets are being tracked by the Data Rescue Project, which you can find here.
As of now, the future of several datasets hosted by the Department of Education remains unclear. For this reason, our team at the Education Data Center has archived the assessment proficiency and participation data available from the U.S. Department of Education’s EDFacts Initiative. You can now find all of the available EDFacts assessment data through Spring 2022 on our EDFacts Archive page.
What is EDFacts?
EDFacts is “a U.S. Department of Education (ED) initiative to collect, analyze, and promote the use of high-quality, pre-kindergarten through grade 12 data.” This serves as an important public database for assessment proficiency data and assessment participation rate data as reported from State Education Agencies (SEAs) to ED.
Beginning with data reported for Spring 2022, ED transitioned to a new dashboard called ED Data Express. For ease of use, our team at the EDC has downloaded all assessment proficiency and participation data for 2022 and added this to our EDFacts Archive page here. We have combined the 2022 performance and participation data. Improvements for 2022 compared to prior years include:
Science data are now available
State-level data are now available
To be clear, these data are still available from ED, though the ED Data Express is admittedly a bit cumbersome. It is our hope that our EDFacts Archive can a) make these files easily accessible, and b) preserve these files in the event any ED webpages are taken down.
How is EDFacts Different from EDC’s State Assessment Data Repository?
Both EDFacts and the State Assessment Data Repository reflect outcomes from annual state summative assessments. However, data reported as part of EDFacts has been submitted to ED from SEAs as part of a comprehensive data collection and review process. For this reason, EDFacts data files are typically several years behind the most current assessment. On the other hand, the State Assessment Data Repository reflects the data reported publicly by SEAs from the most current assessment. These data are supplemented with data from data requests as well as information from EDFacts, where not otherwise available. In addition, while EDFacts currently reports only the percentage of students reaching “proficient or above” on state assessments, the State Assessment Data Repository aims to have data disaggregated for all available achievement levels; these data files also include additional district and school identifiers and other district and school characteristics from the National Center for Education Statistics (such as county name and code).
What’s Next?
At the EDC, we will continue to publish state assessment data available from State Education Agencies (SEAs) each June and December. We are working hard every day to produce clear and comprehensive data files, looking for areas where we can pursue additional data through Spring 2024 and preparing for upcoming 2025 data releases. We will also continue to maintain the EDFacts Archive for the research community that may rely on this information.
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