"A Guide to Improving the National Education Data System" (1990) makes 36 recommendations for improving data collection in the areas of student/background characteristics, education resources, school processes, and student outcomes. This paper uses the framework of the "Guide" to review issues raised in "Education Counts," a recent examination of the nation's capacity to measure and monitor educational change, focusing specifically on data needed to address issues of educational equity with respect to student populations. The first section discusses current equity and at-risk policy issues and the data needed to address them. The second section looks more closely at the data currently available to address these items. The third section examines limitations in current data collections for addressing equity issues, and a fourth section provides specific recommendations for ways to improve the national data system to address equity issues. Recommendations center on the creation of student-based record systems, the linkage of elementary and secondary systems, the development of new measures and indicators, and the reporting of data according to student characteristics. (Contains 10 figures, 2 appendixes, and 60 references.) (SLD)

This open access book examines the interrelationship of national policy, teacher effectiveness, and student outcomes with a specific emphasis on educational equity. Using data from the IEA’s Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) conducted between 1995 and 2015, it investigates grade four and grade eight data to assess trends in key teacher characteristics (experience, education, preparedness, and professional development) and teacher behaviors (instructional time and instructional content), and how these relate to student outcomes. Taking advantage of national curriculum data collected by TIMSS to assess changes in curricular strategy across countries and how these may be related to changes in teacher and student factors, the study focuses on the distributional impact of curriculum and instruction on students, paying particular attention to overall inequalities and variations in socioeconomic status at the student and country level, and how such factors have altered over time. Multiple methods, including regression and fixed effects analyses, and structural equation modelling, establish the evolution of these associations over time.