Research Center to Scour States’ Data Troves

The Urban Institute and six universities have joined forces to start a federal research center to mine the wealth of long-term data now piling up in state education databases.

The newly created Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, or CALDER, is being launched with a five-year, $10 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences.

The job of the center, which the Urban Institute announced last week, is to tap into the trove of statistics that states are amassing through new data-collection systems that use unique “identifier” numbers so that students—and teachers—can be tracked anonymously over time as they move from classroom to classroom...