Federal reporting can be described as many things – efficient it is not. State education agency staff (SEAs) know the process well, including what is sometimes the pain of collecting, validating, and submitting EDFacts files.
The improvement of data quality and automation of federal reporting has long been a goal across SEAs. This goal is closer than ever to becoming a reality. With a grant from the U.S. Department of Education Office of Special Education Programs, the Center for the Integration of IDEA Data has created a free software application to do just that.
Generate, developed by AEM, is designed to automate and simplify EDFacts reporting, provide consistency across SEAs for IDEA data reporting, and produce user-friendly reports to support data use.
Now, with the support of the Nebraska Department of Education, we have developed a standard ETL to allow the easy implementation of Generate for all Ed-Fi states. The Generate Plugin is now available on our Exchange.
The Ed-Fi Generate Plugin provides a standard means to transfer data from an Ed-Fi ODS into the Generate CEDS Integrated Data Store (IDS). The plugin consists of a set of standardized ETLs that agencies use to migrate data from an Ed-Fi ODS into CEDS IDS and the CEDS Reporting Data Store, creating an end-to-end solution for federal reporting.
We haven’t yet achieved every SEA’s dream of completely turnkey federal reporting, but we do believe Generate is the key to getting there.
