Using Stata for Educational Accountability and Compliance Reporting

In 2013 the Mississippi State Legislature passed a law requiring the state to adopt a single combined statewide accountability system for schools and districts; additionally, the law also restricted the State from using some of the methods that were used in the accountability system of the time. Once the State Board of Education voted to adopt the proposed model, the next major task was to program all of the business rules/requirements and calculations. This presentation will focus on what happened from there leading to the current state of the accountability system. Using Stata, I was able to reduce much of the complexity of the previous accountability model (using Some Alternate Software). The current model uses 15 programs written in Stata to import data from an internal server, implement the rules specified in the business rules document, estimate the ratios required by the system, create graphs to illustrate school vs district vs state comparisons, and build school and district reports for public consumption. Using Stata’s capabilities, we are able to automate report generation by writing LaTeX source code and a Bash script used to compile and clean up the output form the LaTeX files and save considerable time in the process.