EDFacts Data Set - Poverty Quartile

EDFacts Data Set

(OMB 1875-0240)

Technical Amendments

For SYs 2008-09 and 2009-10

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act

June 2009

Table of Contents

Purpose 3

Background 3

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act 3

Availability of Data on Poverty 3

Proposed Change to the EDFacts Data Set 4

Impact on the Legacy Collection CSPR (OMB 1810-0614) 4

Burden 5

Purpose

This document lists changes requested for the approved EDFacts Data Set for school years 2008-09 and SY 2009-10 for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). The changes impact the data collected about schools.

Background

The current EDFacts data set is approved for three school years: 2007-08, 2008-09, and 2009-10. The school year 2007-08 data is currently being collected. The collection of the school year 2008-09 began in January 2009.

The EDFacts data set is composed of data groups and categories. The structure of the EDFacts data set is explained in Attachment B-1. So that the data groups and categories can be identified as such, the names of data groups and categories are in italic in this document.

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act

Under ARRA, states are required to provide assurances in the following four areas:

1. Making progress toward rigorous college- and career-ready standards and high-quality assessments that are valid and reliable for all students, including English language learners and students with disabilities;

2. Establishing pre-K-to college and career data systems that track progress and foster continuous improvement;

3. Making improvements in teacher effectiveness and in the equitable distribution of qualified teachers for all students, particularly students who are most in need;

4. Providing intensive support and effective interventions for the lowest-performing schools.

In order to monitor, the third assurance regarding the equitable distribution of qualified teachers, ED needs to know which schools are in the high and low poverty quartiles.

Availability of Data on Poverty

Under ESEA, states are allowed the flexibility to use a poverty metric of their own choosing for the reporting of classes taught by highly qualified teachers by poverty quartile. Therefore, there is no one set of poverty data that ED could use to generate this information on high and low poverty quartiles at the school level.

ED has been collecting data on the quartile, and on the poverty metric used, through manual entry in the Consolidated State Performance Report. (The data are not current in EDFacts). The data was provided only at the state-level. The focus on equitable distribution of effective teachers that is written into the Recovery Act, increases both the focus and the planned uses for this data. Therefore, having only state level data is no longer sufficient.

Under ESEA, ED must allow states the flexibility to choose their own poverty metric, and to report data on which schools are in their high-poverty and low-poverty quartiles according to that metric. If reauthorization makes changes to this area of the law to allow for the common construction of one poverty metric across the country, ED will adapt the EDFacts data set accordingly.

Proposed Change to the EDFacts Data Set

To obtain data on which schools are in the high and low poverty quartiles, the EDFacts data set will need to include the following data group.

Data Group ID
Data Group Name	State Poverty Designation
Section	Education units
Definition	The designation of a school’s poverty quartile for purposes of determining classes taught by highly qualified teachers in high and low poverty schools, according to state’s indicator of poverty
Permitted Values	High poverty quartile school Low poverty quartile school Neither high nor low poverty quartile school
Reporting Period	School year
Steward	OESE
Reporting Levels	School
File Specification	N/X103 Accountability (formerly AYP Status)

Impact on the Legacy Collection CSPR (OMB 1810-0614)

The data represented by this additional data group are already used by the SEAs to respond to section 1.5 of the CSPR. In that section, SEAs provide the number of core academic classes by teacher qualification for schools in the high poverty quartile and for schools in the low poverty quartile. Because the EDFacts data set did not include data on which schools were in each quartile, that section of the CSPR was manual input.

The data on the quartile of the schools can be used both to monitor the assurances under ARRA and to populate section 1.5 of the CSPR.

Burden

SEAs have records of which schools are in the high and low poverty quartiles. The SEAs use that data to calculate the number of core academic classes by teacher qualifications for schools in the high and low poverty quartiles. That calculation is a response to questions in section 1.5 of the CSPR.

The difference is that SEAs would submit records for each school on whether the school was in the high, low or neither high nor low quartile. EDFacts will use that data combined with data EDFacts already receives on core academic classes to respond to the questions in section 1.5.

Since that data will be used to populate the CSPR, SEAs will not have the burden of manually filling in that portion of the CSPR. The additional burden for submitting the records for each school is offset by the burden of manually filling in the CSPR.

Page 5 of 5