Tuesday, June 21, 2005

Metadata for No Child Left Behind (NCLB)

For anyone in K-12 education today there is a lot of talk about the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). This act requires that each subgroup within a K-12 school or district (subgroups being groups of Asian, Black, Hispanic, special education or students with limited English skills) make adequate yearly progress. But in order to do this we require longitudinal data. Without good metadata definitions no state can really claim to be making good progress if they don't have consistent definitions over time and across organizations. Wouldn’t it be great if some federal agency published a set of NCLB metadata guidelines that could then directly load into cubes for doing the research on? How about in CWM format? But that would make our lives easier, wouldn't it?

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