Legislative panel hears plan to tighten state education data with a governance council

Tim Bedeaux, senior policy analyst to the Legislative Education Study Committee, told members that high-quality analysis and sound policy depend on accurate, complete, consistent, granular and timely data. "High quality data leads to high quality analysis, leads to high quality policy," he said, summarizing the problems his office encountered when evaluating several priorities on the LESC work plan.

Bedeaux described specific analytic gaps: the Family Income Index lacked school-level expenditure detail, structured literacy evaluations could not be tied to individual teachers by year, and career and technical education (CTE) participation records existed for Perkins reporting but were not accessible to staff. He showed an example where mismatched name fields and non-unique program IDs caused a merge that dropped roughly half of teachers from a residency analysis, a practical illustration of how data errors can erase evidence critical to program evaluation.

Presenters and staff argued the solution is stronger data governance. "Data governance is everything you do to ensure data is secure, private, accurate, available, and usable," Bedeaux said, citing standard definitions and three governance domains used by the National Center for Education Statistics: organizational coordination, higher-quality data, and improved usability.

Paige Kowalski, executive vice president of the national nonprofit Data Quality Campaign, urged creating a leadership-level governance body that can set priorities, require consistent reporting rules and escalate unresolved technical problems to agency heads. "When you have a board that's a majority vote ... the work can still go forward," Kowalski said, describing a model in which technical staff clean and translate data and a policy board makes binding decisions and secures funding and accountability.

Kowalski and Tim outlined five policy options for New Mexico, ranked from lower-complexity measures such as statutory reporting deadlines to the most complex option: creating an independent agency to staff and manage a statewide governance council. They warned that executive orders often lack permanence and highlighted state examples: Washington (legislatively created research data centers), Maryland (a governing board model), Kentucky (KYStats), California's Cradle-to-Career governance board, Colorado and Virginia.

Michael Smith and Stephanie Maez of ICASA at New Mexico Tech described a two-year statewide data governance project funded by a 2024 appropriation ($480,000). ICASA's preliminary findings from landscape mapping and stakeholder interviews mirror LESC staff concerns: siloed systems across agencies, uneven technical capacity, outdated platforms, incomplete data-management protocols and a strong appetite among agencies for coordinated solutions.

Members asked whether New Mexico should aim for the independent-agency model. Bedeaux said that option would likely be most effective but also most complex to implement and would require close collaboration with PED and other agencies to honor existing work and build capacity. ICASA said it could provide technical support if the Legislature trusted it to play that role.

The presenters also recommended operational steps LESC could take immediately: create a collaborative research agenda with agencies so requests are feasible, require unique IDs (for teachers and students) to avoid name-based merges, set statutory timelines for key datasets, and make validated assessment results available earlier in the calendar to inform interim analyses.

Next steps described to the committee included further stakeholder engagement, possible interim reports and follow-up legislative options; presenters recommended pairing governance design with resources to staff validation and data-sharing work so statutory deadlines are realistic.