What are the benefits of matching and linking state solutions?
When considering funding school programs on a local or district level, states will look to the unduplicated count of a school or a network of schools in order to determine what manner of funding is required. Studies have shown that when schools don’t use some sort of education unique identifiers for their students, things only tend to become much more difficult for both the school’s administration and the enrolled student together.
Without unique identifiers (UIDs) for students allowing schools to produce an unduplicated count to relay to district and state systems, schools have to resort to inefficient and unproductive student identification and matchmaking strategies in order to either estimate or partially report student body statistics to state offices.
Obviously, an unnecessarily complicated and inaccurate student identification procedure is not ideal, neither for the school or the governing body involved. On account of this, it should be within both a state or school district and a school’s best interest to ensure that a consistent, accurate measure of students is kept up to date by both parties.
What Are the Benefits of States Having Immediate Access to Unduplicated Counts
When a state is aware of the unduplicated count of students within school networks, decision-making regarding said school networks is much more streamlined, allowing for a quicker and more personal experience when it comes to receiving funding and implementing new programs.
However, the impact that education unique identifiers have goes much deeper than simply relaying overall enrollment or demographics to an administrator. Using unique identifiers allows for schools to notice patterns in learning types, student backgrounds, performance in certain types of classes by different control groups, and so on. With UIDs, these schools can do something that other schools using mixed identification or some other tactic in collecting education data just can’t do more often than not.
Using extremely precise and tailor-made data sets is a privilege for some school systems across the country and allows for this sensitive data to be perfectly relayed toward their respective administrative centers within state systems if the correct software infrastructure is in place. Then, of course, whenever data abnormalities become relevant or special cases are apparent, states can identify immediately when and where new funding needs to be allocated to certain schools.
How Can the Accurate Transfer of this Data be Ensured Between School and State?
The best method to answer this question is by linking the software solutions that both entities use in monitoring things like this. While in some cases it may be common for school districts to have developed in-house software solutions for their education data, the most reliable and streamlined process for schools and states to share this data accurately is by simply sharing their software, which is most easily done when all units within a district use a similar or the same product such as SaaS, an excellent example of this would be Pennsylvania’s school system and their global use of UIDs through the PA secure ID program started in 2007, linked together globally by education data services, such as those provided by eScholar.
