Earlier this month, President Obama signed an executive order that will essentially provide reporters—and the general public, including entrepreneurs—enhanced and quicker access to government data, including educational data.
The order is intended to make “Open and Machine Readable the New Default for Government Information.” In other words, information that was paid for by taxpayers should be readable by taxpayers and open to the tax-paying public. Nothing in the order is intended to divulge confidential information or any other information that is protected by privacy policies or laws like FERPA, which has been modified a little to take the order into account.
The National Center for Education Statistics, which has anticipated this for months, is now in the process of linking up data tables that contain values for thousands of education-related variables across the country. However, because the databases weren’t originally designed to work with each other, technology specialists have their work cut out for them, and the process could take several months: “There are data files there I didn’t know about,” one NCES official told a blogger on EdMedia Commons.
Furthermore, users who aren’t accustomed to reading educational data may proceed with false assumptions or have trouble reading the data they see. For example, one database may use letters to define a high school teacher’s educational attainment, such as BA, MA, PHD, while another database uses ID numbers, such as 1, 2, and 3. Getting these two databases to talk to each other so information can be pooled will be a neat trick.
The new access to information is potentially valuable to entrepreneurs and was hailed as “the best thing Obama’s done this month” on Slate.com. For example, if a company wants to decide if changing their daycare into a preschool would be welcomed by parents, it might help to know if kids who attend preschool tend to finish college. If they can find a way to use the new access to longitudinal data, they may be able to make better decisions about the types of programs they should develop.
A great deal of educational data is already available, of course, like the Common Core of Data (CCD), which provides enrollment and socioeconomic data for every public school in the US, or the suite of tools for analyzing thousands of variables about the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), known as the nation’s report card. But in addition to making the public aware of data tables heretofore unknown even to NCES officials, the executive order hopes to make access to all this data easier and quicker.