The State Education Data Center (SEDC) is a new service of the Council of Chief State School Officers, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as part of the Council's National Education Data Partnership. The SEDC will position itself as a leading voice on public education data and will focus on two work strands: (1) serving as a national advocacy leader for quality education data collection, standards, and use; and (2) serving as the nation's provider of a free, easy-to-use website featuring state education data and analytic tools.

Through the SEDC:

• State education data will be collected and displayed on a user-friendly, publicly accessible website available at SchoolDataDirect.org. Also, researchers will be able to download files containing the data directly from the website's database. Standard & Poor's is the service provider for this effort.
• The Coordinated Data Ask (CDA) will provide states and data collectors with a unified data collection template that, for the first time, identifies the most commonly requested education data elements and their agreed upon definitions. The elements included in the template have been crosswalked to the 2006-07 EDFacts data groups and to SIF objects. Most (and eventually all) of the elements can be downloaded directly from SchoolDataDirect.org. The CDA is a collaborative effort with the Data Quality Campaign and the U.S. Department of Education.
• An advisory council of chiefs, national data collectors, and national education policy organizations will refine and enhance the national conversation on the appropriate collection, use, and analysis of state education data. The work of the advisory council will help position the SEDC as a sustainable national resource to support public education.
• The Council's Education Information Management Advisory Consortium (EIMAC) will serve as a resource to the SEDC in advising on common data standards and data collection and use methods at the national level.