High-quality data governance, a body or process designed to make decisions about how state education data is linked, used, accessed, and protected, is key to establishing a culture of effective data use in states. The three data governance bodies featured in this paper—the Kentucky Center for Education and Workforce Statistics (KCEWS), the Maryland Longitudinal Data System (MLDS) Center, and Washington’s Education Research & Data Center (ERDC)—reflect the unique context of each state and have broken down the silos that tend to exist among state agencies that use data to support education and workforce efforts.
For more information and recommendations on how states can develop and implement high-quality data governance, see Roadmap for Cross-Agency Data Governance.