I work for a school district in the US that serves grades K-12 and also work with another 21 agencies in my county. The data quality is extremely varied between the districts. As California is attempting to switch to a statewide student data system it is revealing that many of the districts in California just simply do not have the infrastructure to even manage the data and, of those that do, for many data quality has been an after thought.

What I have realized in working with our district (who I have to say is consistently in the top tier regarding quality) is it is a joint effort between the IT staff, the administration staff and the data entry staff themselves (clerks and teachers for the most part).

It is quite evident that data entry staff are only really concerned with data that affects them personally. For instance, student test scores and grades, their teacher and courses and their attendance record are of very high quality. This is because this affects the teacher/student on a daily basis. The attendance record directly impacts the district financially.

As we started several years ago to clean up other areas we would encourage staff as to their importance in the grand view of things but, unless they had a personal ambition to do high quality work, many felt they couldn't spend the time.

We use several 3rd party software systems and have many internal applications. Unfortunately many vendors just do not put a value on data quality. Some might argue that we should switch vendors but our vendor is actually one of the best (some others are far worse) and the current investment is too time/financially prohibitive. Some of our most trusted systems allow users to enter bad data all the time. Since we have many custom database services that move our data around, bad data in one system can often cause errors when moving to other systems.

One of the best things we did was to create our own internal audit tracking system. It tracks hundreds of different data points every day and emails out reports to the relevant administration staff. Having an audit system that catches errors within hours (not months) has proven to be very effective. As users start to get reports on errors they entered the day before they start taking a personal investment in their data and they also get better at verifying data they enter in the first place.

We still have a long way to go but I believe it is systems like this that empower users and aid accountability that help us constantly be at the top.