FISCAL RESOURCES

Time Fiscal Resources Capacity Advice to Policymakers

Creating usable TQ data warehouses is a fairly expensive endeavor. Much of the cost comes from creating systems that accurately collect the data from different entities. A large state could require the investment of several millions of dollars to start the system from scratch. The costs of such systems are necessary to ensure that all members of the system have the capacity to create and submit data.  

For example, school districts must hire personnel and implement data systems that track teachers and students across time, from school to school, and even from classroom to classroom. Moreover, the district must hire personnel to submit data to the state for the creation of a state data system. This submission can include hundreds of variables on every school in the district, scores of variables on each teacher and administrator in the district, and numerous variables on each student in the district. For an example of the large number of variables that should be submitted, see Texas for a review of just some of the data that are submitted in Texas. Other data are even more complex to collect and submit, such as the percentage of a full-time equivalent each teacher is assigned to each course that she or he teaches.

States also must invest in computer systems able to upload large amounts of information from school districts, merge the data, and hold large data sets for use by researchers. This is no small endeavor in states like Texas and California with 300,000 teachers and hundreds of thousands of students in hundreds or thousands of schools.

Last updated: February 6, 2006