Detailed US achievement data available
What results might one be able to find in the latest iteration of the EDC State Assessment Data?
Over on EDC State Assessment Data Substack, a newsletter published by the Education Data Center, the EDC published an article discussing the latest tranche of data about achievement in US schools on 2 June 2026. In addition to providing a link to EDC where one can download the data directly, the post included highlights of the new data set as well as notes about updates from version 3.0 of the data set See “New Grade 3-8 Assessment Data from the Education Data Center - Version 3.1: Updated repository + Data analyst opportunity” to read the post.
Longtime readers of Special Education Today may recall that on 6 December 2023 we published an article (“Zelma.ai with E. Oster: What do you want to know about students’ performance in US states?”) announcing the beginning of the project to publish these data. The present iteration of the data base shows that the project is mature and quite valuable. There are data from all US states and similar administrative units and the data go down to individual local education agencies and individual schools.
SET readers will likely find it especially important the data for students with disabilities can be examined directly. Parents should be able to use the data to compare how their LEA is doing in comparison to others in their state. Administrators can get a sense of how their agency of even building is doing compared to others. Researchers will be able to use the data, too; for example, they could establish how representative the schools in their samples are.
To help readers get a sense of what’s available, here is a paragraph from a document (“edc_sadr_data_documentation_v3.1.pdf”) published by the EDC:
The State Assessment Data Repository (SADR) is a comprehensive U.S. state assessment database that includes publicly-available assessment data for students in Grades 3-8 from all 50 states, D.C., Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands This database integrates data across state-, district-, and school- levels, disaggregated by subject, grade level and student subgroups. SADR includes data received from State Education Agencies (SEAs) via public data request for components that states have not posted publicly, such as data disaggregated by grade or demographic characteristics. The data do not include any student-level data or personally identifiable information (PII). We also integrate important school and district identifiers from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to support researchers seeking to understand student outcome data across a range of external datasets.
Readers may (and might really want to) start their own free subscriptions to the EDC State Assessment Data Substack:
