ACTE: your voice in the data policy debate: CTE needs to be involved in the data discussion to ensure the "CTE voice" is included. ACTE staff provide a central leadership role as these issues are being discussed at the national level.

DeWitt, Stephen

DATA CAN BE A POWERFUL TOOL TO HELP SUPPORT TEACHERS and administrators as they seek to improve student performance, transition persistence and completion, or it can be a hindrance and downright harmful if used incorrectly. Worse yet, without robust and meaningful data, there is no foundation for the accountability-based education decisions that many policymakers seek and support.

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Career and technical education (CTE needs to he involved in the data discussion to ensure the "GTE voice" is included. The Association for Career and Technical Education (ACTE) staff provide a central leadership role as these issues are being discussed at the national level. Over the past year, there have been several important data policy-related projects that I wanted to share with you in case you have missed the information on ACTE's website or blogs, or other communications.

Certification Data Exchange Project

In cooperation wit h federal agencies, national organizations and state partners, ACTE helped to initiate a pilot project to improve data exchange between industry-certification organizations and state education- and workforce longitudinal-data systems. This pilot was based on a recent Illinois and CompTIA project that demonstrated the Feasibility of linking state and certification data.

Workforce Data Quality Campaign (WDOC)

Education data and labor data are often siloed, and laws related to student privacy contribute to the difficulty in tracking 'student placement after graduation. For these reasons, ACTE has worked with the WDQC, an emerging project focused on encouraging state and federal policymakers to develop policies to support more inclusive, aligned and market-relevant education- and workforce-data systems.

As part of the WQDC. ACTE and our partner organizations are asking that workforce- and education-data systems: include all students and pathways, count industry-recognized credentials and degrees, assess employment outcomes (or all participants, expand use of labor-market information and ensure appropriate data access and use.

CTE Courses: Creating Commonality With SCED Project

In addition to ensuring data sources "speak" to each other, ensuring a level of consistency in reporting is important. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which is the U.S. Department of Education's data arm, provides School Codes for the Exchange of Data (SCED). These codes are used for a variety of purposes, with the main goal being to ensure a level of standardization that will support comparison of information on high school courses across the education community.

When SCED was recently reviewed for updating. ACTE was contacted to lead the process to ensure GTE course titles and descriptions were relevant and up-to-date. The voluntary common language for secondary CTE course names and descriptions incorporated into SCED help level the education playing field for CTE.

ACTE's leadership and advocacy on data issues is integrated and complementary to our legislative advocacy efforts. For instance, as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was debated in the Senate earlier this year, ACTE promoted an amendment to require reporting of high school student GTE performance in state report cards. Senator Tammy Baldwin sponsored the amendment, and it was approved on a bipartisan basis thanks to her leadership. A similar effort and bipartisan adoption took place in the House, led by Rep. Dan Benishek (R-MI).

Such requirement, as outlined by the amendments begin to address a more accurate definition of career readiness and will help parents and students better understand the value of CTE. You can read more about these projects on the ACTE website at www.acteonline.org/data_quality_initiatives.

The CTE Support Fund directly benefits ACTE's advocacy efforts to support and advance CTE across the country. Learn more and make a crucial donation at www.acteonline.org/supportfund.

Stephen DeWitt is deputy executive director at ACTE. He can be contacted at sdewitt@acteonline.org.