Education
State Education Agencies

As a means of improving the quality and consistency of data collections submitted to federal programs (e.g., No Child Left Behind, Common Core of Data), Certica provides state agencies with a solution which enables local agencies to take a more pro-active role in validating their district-level data submissions. This cooperation between school districts and state education agencies results in:

• More comprehensive, flexible and better-understood data validation rules.
• Improved communication and feedback between state and district agencies.
• Shortened cycle time for error identification, correction and submission.
• Reduced burden on both state and local agencies.
• Measurably higher levels of quality in state data submitted to the U.S. Department of Education’s EDEN repository.

Until recently, it has been impractical for school districts to effectively validate their own data before submitting it to state agencies. Ad-hoc queries or hard-coded validations lack the rigor and flexibility needed to achieve significant and lasting improvements in quality. Further, many school districts have inadequate resources to clean up data in the time windows prescribed by the state.

Certica’s approach to data validation, monitoring and reporting is highly automated, executing real-time, inline, rules-based validations against district and state-level data. Now, states can automatically validate incoming data, send email notifications and online data quality report cards to the districts, allowing them to review and correct errors quickly.

Whereas state agencies once faced a trade-off between timeliness and accuracy in their receipt of local data, Certica’s solution enables states to collect better data–faster.

Profile: New Hampshire Department of Education

The New Hampshire Department of Education (NH DOE) is in the forefront of the movement to automate, streamline and upgrade the education system’s approach to data quality management. By integrating Certica’s automated data validation solution into their data collection system, NH DOE has been able to:

• Define business rules to ensure the consistency and integrity of data across 180 New Hampshire school districts.
• Pinpoint data errors so they can be reviewed and corrected by district-level administrators.
• Ensure the integrity of unique student identifiers by validating student records before they are assigned an ID.
• Shorten the timeframe for data collection, validation and clean-up.