Assessing National Data on Education

Efforts to improve education may be misdirected without adequate data to monitor developments and elucidate key issues. This assessment evaluates some 35 data bases, federal and privately sponsored, that report national education statistics in terms of their potential for informing policy deliberations. It argues that for all the national data collected, information is largely lacking on several major concerns, often inadequate statistically, and sometimes contradictory. From this evaluation, various improvements are proposed to upgrade the collection of policy-oriented data.