ELQIS data meeting

You can stream today's ELQIS data subcommittee meeting (agenda) or attend.

9:45 Somebody asked whether anybody had thought about connecting the data silos. They danced around an answer. The answer should have been that what they call data buckets are tables in a relational database. Of course they communicate. The way you do it is to write a query.

They don't seem to think it is important to distinguish different classrooms in a facility or sessions in a program. I think it is. Except for those lacunae, I think they got the tables right.

10:30 The CDE data guy explaining CalPADS thinks it's okay to plan for different identifiers for Pre-K, K-12, and college. Why in the world would you want to do that?

10:35 They MAY start having unique identifiers in non-LEA centers. May? May? Why would you throw away data?

10:45 How about having the R&R issue SSIDs for non-LEAs?

Done. All in all, I see reason for hope. They seemed to be taking people's suggestions seriously, and there were no extreme positions being pushed, although a number of folks had strong feelings about details. It was all in a spirit of figuring out how to do this.

I like that Nancy Remley skipped discussion of whether a unique identifier was important and got right into how to make it work. You can't have a data system like this without unique identifiers, so there's no sense discussing whether to have them.