Celebrating 20 Years of Business: Data Collection & Use

Throughout its 20 years, QIP has performed a wide variety of roles for many clients across public and private sectors. This blog focuses on work we’re very proud of and have a long history in: data management.

QIP has supported the US Department of Education’s (ED) centralized EDFacts system for more than 10 years. We assist in the collection of more than 70 data files for 15 different ED program offices annually from each state education agency (SEA). These files include federal program mandates relating to special education, homelessness, and migrant students. Data are reported at the state, district, and school levels, including approximately 17,000 districts and 100,000 schools. QIP data collection and management experts (including data standard developers, data analysts, SAS programmers, and quality assurance testers) work side by side with the National Center for Education Sciences (NCES) and AEM (our prime contractor) staff to deliver all aspects of EDFacts data management support.

QIP developed and directed the first EDFacts Data Management Team, which was responsible for creating data processes, defining data items, documenting standard operating procedures, responding to ad hoc requests, and providing essential subject matter and operational expertise to EDFacts initiatives focused on meeting ED data needs including

• data governance;
• acquisition;
• quality;
• disclosure avoidance;
• statistical; and
• reporting (internal and external).

QIP staff create more than 150 public data files, documentation, and tables released on the ED website each year. For example, each year the Common Core of Data (CCD) nonfiscal school data are released on the NCES website in 5 different public data files with 12 different pieces of documentation. To put that into perspective:  just one of those, the annual CCD school membership file, has more than 99,000 entities, 18 variables, and more than 11 million records that are collected, reviewed, processed, and released through our work.

This is just one example of QIP’s data management work. We’re proud of our work on each project, helping ED to receive higher quality data faster.