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In 2023, ERDC sustained our core business and supported new activities to strengthen our governance, research, and technical work and to begin the modernization of the P20W data system. Over the course of 2023, ERDC:
- Received and authorized 84 data requests for P20W data, an increase of 27% from 2022. In total, ERDC delivered 70 requests to state agencies, legislative staff, nonprofit organizations, ethnic commissions, and academic researchers. This is up 37% from 2022!
- Updated ERDC's Critical Research & Policy Questions and developed the ERDC Research Agenda with extensive partner-based feedback to help ERDC prioritize future work.
- Implemented a new approach to research and reporting with our "Dual Credit Portfolio” which includes multiple data tools to meet different needs, including a dashboard, legislative report, research briefs and ongoing workgroup engagement to inform and guide these efforts.
- Secured funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and launched projects to support P20W data modernization efforts according to recommendations in the P20W Data System Study completed in summer 2023.
The hard work of the ERDC staff and the continued engagement of our data contributing partners have been pivotal to these successes and will continue to be critical as we move into 2024.
Using the ERDC Critical Questions as a guiding framework, ERDC convened a workgroup consisting of more than 30 agencies, community-based organizations, and researchers to determine research topics and questions of vital importance to Washington’s students, families, and education systems. Through a series of meetings over last summer and fall, the workgroup identified numerous topic areas and research questions whose answers would have a meaningful impact on understanding and improving equity in student access, experiences, and outcomes.
Read ERDC's Research Agenda.
Over the last 15 years, the Washington public K-12 education system has collected increasingly more detailed student race and ethnicity data. This ERDC report highlights these key changes made across three phases. The changes to data collection have necessitated new strategies for data reporting. Key findings from this report include:
- Detailed race and ethnicity data can provide new insights about education outcomes for more distinctive groups, but data about the smallest populations may run into student privacy issues.
- It remains a challenge to accurately represent multiracial student identities in reporting, even with the addition of more detailed race and ethnicity data.
- Useful alternative approaches for reporting detailed race and ethnicity student data in a disaggregated form exist, but challenges can still arise.
ERDC's latest dual credit research brief examined postsecondary enrollment outcomes for students who enrolled in dual credit. Findings from the analysis include:
- Graduates who enrolled in dual credit had substantially higher rates of postsecondary enrollment than those who did not enroll in dual credit. Enrollment rates were highest for Running Start students and lowest for Career and Technical Education-Dual Credit students.
- The magnitude of the postsecondary enrollment rate increase varied by student group and dual credit type, particularly for Running Start and federal racial and ethnic categories.
- Graduates who enrolled in postsecondary education after high school primarily did so at in-state public institutions. However, whether they enrolled at a community and technical college or four-year baccalaureate institution varied by dual credit type.
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Annie Pennucci will be joining OFM in January as our new Forecasting and Research Director, replacing Marc Baldwin who is leaving state service in February. Annie has more than two decades of experience, including 15 years of providing and presenting data and research to the Legislature when she worked at the Washington State Institute for Public Policy. She was most recently the Associate Vice President of Research, Evaluation, & Program Development for the King County Housing Authority, where she led teams of analytical professionals focused on data, innovation, equity and impact.
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Heather McCabe will be transitioning her focus on grant-funded research projects into a permanent Senior Research Scientist position that focuses on special populations. She started in this new role in December. Heather is a sociologist with a master’s degree from Portland State University. She has experience working in our educational system in many different areas: early learning, K-12, postsecondary, special education, school to career transitions, language acquisition, and alternative education.
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Matt Borda will be joining the ERDC team as a Senior Research Scientist with responsibility for implementing expanded higher education reporting under SB 5512 as well as other research that leverages ERDC’s P20W data system. He brings more than a decade of experience in higher education research first in federal education data at the American Institutes for Research and then in various analytical and leadership roles at Seattle University. Matt will be joining us in January.
- Back in October, Phil Hurvitz joined the OFM Forecasting team in the position of Senior Data Scientist, working with the Public Centralized Higher Ed Enrollment System (PCHEES) data collection system and the Institutions. Phil is a lifelong resident of Seattle with degrees from Seattle University and the University of Washington.
The Washington Student Achievement Council (WSAC) will partner with MDRC, a nonprofit research organization, to undertake a new research project looking at the array of options young adults may pursue as they transition out of K-12 education, as well as the labor market benefits of each. The research will be supported by data from the Washington Education Research & Data Center (ERDC) and funded by an award of $750,000 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to MDRC. Learn more.
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