ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the data-quality problems facing the US Department of Education and how the Department has responded to these problems. It focuses on attaining high quality performance data. The chapter describes data-quality problems in the context of the federal education role; the third section summarizes the Department’s Data Quality Improvement initiative and describes key aspects of its implementation. The US Department of Education faces major challenges in obtaining high-quality data on program performance. A major reason for these challenges is the nature of the federal role in education. The small, federal role in a highly decentralized US education system means that the Department must collect data through a series of intermediaries, each with different histories, contexts, and goals. Lack of coordination among the nearly 200 federal education programs and inexperience in data use among federal managers also present challenges to obtaining and using quality data.
