Dr. Chris King, director of the Ray Marshall Center and Tara Smith, Center research associate attended a Workforce Data Quality Initiative conference held in Arlington, VA November 14-16. In 2010, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration provided $12.2 million in funding to 13 states to expand and improve longitudinal databases of workforce data that also link to education data and support state-level initiatives to use these longitudinal databases to conduct research and analysis aimed at pinpointing the effectiveness of employment and training programs in order to better inform workforce system customers. As part of this new program, the Labor Department awarded almost $1 million to the Texas Workforce Commission (TWC). TWC partnered with the Ray Marshall Center to implement the Workforce Data Quality Initiative in Texas.
The initiative is nearing the completion of its first year. The purpose of the conference was to bring together WDQI grantees, to share information on challenges and promising practices as well as to explore “creating data-driven products to support sustainability.” In addition, grantees received information about the U.S. Department of Education’s Privacy Technical Assistance Center, and updates on proposed revisions to FERPA, as well as opportunities to access other data systems, such as the Wage Record Interchange System (WRIS) and Federal Employment Data Exchange System (FEDES). In the second half of the conference, WDQI grantees joined the Department of Education’s State Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) grantees to explore opportunities for linking the two initiatives.
Joining King and Smith at the conference were Texas Workforce Commission representatives Ruben Garcia and Grady Giffin. A project overview of the Texas Workforce Data Quality Initiative is available here.
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