All RISE: A Statewide Longitudinal Data System in New Mexico

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We’re not trying to improve K–12 metrics for the sake of those metrics—we’re trying to improve them to help students get to the next step.

-Joseph Leakakos and Kathryn Zenoni

How many New Mexico children start kindergarten ready to learn? How many students graduate high school in four years? Do those graduates enroll in college or trade school and if so, does a degree or credential boost their earnings in adulthood?

These questions capture the lifespan of a New Mexican’s education and workforce involvement—what state leaders and advocates call “cradle to career.” Yet until recently, the answers were scattered across six state agencies and obscured by disconnected datasets that were difficult, if not impossible, to link up.

Not anymore. A new Statewide Longitudinal Data System (SLDS) provides a common home and connects early childhood, education, and workforce data to provide ready answers and accessible visualizations. SDP Fellows Joseph Leakakos and Kathryn Zenoni jointly led the final phase of the project, Research Informing Success in Education, or RISE NM.

It wasn’t easy. When the fellows joined RISE NM, the state had paused or restarted the project several times. With the support of state leadership, Leakakos and Zenoni used their technical know-how and hands-on, trust-building approach to accelerate the project and share transformational insights for all decisionmakers across disparate state agencies.

“Relationships aren’t part of the work,” they said. “Relationships are the work.”

 

From K–12 to P20W

About three dozen states have built or are developing an SLDS that connects early childhood, K–12, postsecondary, and workforce outcomes. By linking detailed, individual-level data across agencies and time, these systems help identify effective school and training programs, common stumbling blocks, and trends by student or worker characteristic. With a projected 72 percent of jobs requiring some form of postsecondary education by 2031, a SLDS can show whether a state’s education and workforce development systems are on-track to meet that demand. 

RISE NM brings together data from 10 different systems across five state agencies: the New Mexico Higher Education Department, Early Childhood Education & Care Department, Public Education Department, Department of Workforce Solutions, and Division of Vocational Rehabilitation. It is both an organizational and technical achievement, as the nation’s first entirely cloud-native SLDS.

To build the system, data from every agency is loaded into a shared cloud-based data lake. There, all records are matched and anonymized by assigning a Master Unique Identifier (MUID), which protects privacy and keeps the data secure. With vendors, the SDP Fellows developed protocols to clean up, validate, and process the data so the information can be readily combined for analysis.

The current RISE NM website includes 27 standard visualizations designed to inform public policy and individual decision-making. For example, a legislator considering a preschool bill can quickly look up kindergarten readiness rates among students by gender, race, and subject area, while a high-school senior planning his next step can look at wage comparisons between college graduates and adults with an associate’s degree.

 

Ambitious or Achievable?

These reflect a substantially streamlined research agenda—initially, agency partners requested more than 250 visualizations be a standard part of the SLDS. The SDP Fellows consolidated and whittled the list down by looking at other SLDS and by meeting with competing groups of stakeholders, including representatives from the state legislature who would eventually interact with the SLDS on the front end, and the data owners and analysts who were vital to its back-end build.

“It’s pretty constant that legislators and executives will want more, but when you talk to the technical people, they feel like what they can offer is much less than that,” said Leakakos. “And the truth is usually much closer to what the technical folks are thinking.”

Yet there were outsized hopes on the technical side as well, such as using artificial intelligence or building a no-code platform. To guide focused conversations and disciplined project leadership, they set data culture and equity as guideposts and kept “the people behind the numbers at the forefront of our minds.” The SDP Fellows also engaged with other SLDS groups nationwide as well as the Community of Innovation initiative, funded by the Gates Foundation.

As published, the visualizations are informative and accessible—which is exactly the point, the SDP Fellows said.

“Often, people want really flashy tech,” said Zenoni. “They want stuff that they can point to and say, ‘look, we’re breaking ground.’ But after talking to people working on other longitudinal data systems, we believe that what we built is breaking ground, even though from the outside it doesn’t look like the flashiest thing in the world.”

 

Lessons Learned

An SLDS relies on data sharing to function. In New Mexico, the biggest hurdle to building RISE NM wasn’t data, but sharing. After several aborted attempts to build an SLDS, partner agencies were distrustful and disengaged, vendors were foundering amid unanswered questions and stalled design planning, and unfinished tasks abounded.

“The No. 1 mistake I see is people thinking that building an SLDS is primarily a tech problem,” said Leakakos. “It’s a relationship problem and a data problem.” 

There were two factors that would support the project to completion: a hard deadline and abiding interest by agency partners, who were ready to work together. The SDP Fellows moved quickly to re-engage partners, clarify unclear data policies and practices, focus decision-making on longevity, and serve as supportive taskmasters. They attributed their strong relationships and resultant success to two major moves.

First, they dedicated substantial time and effort to project management and overcoming longstanding hurdles to completion. When they took over leading the project, Leakakos and Zenoni conducted a progress audit to identify where technical planning, design, and implementation had stopped, which revealed that vendor and agency assumptions about data quality and the hands-on work of populating the data lake did not match up. Staff time was already stretched thin at many agency offices.

Through candid conversations with data partners, the SDP Fellows refocused designs that were a better match to available data. They also pitched in on workaday data management tasks alongside agency partners as needed.

“We hopped on calls with people who didn’t necessarily have the skillset to send their data and walked through it with them, to really meet people where they are,” said Zenoni.

Second, they engaged with stakeholders at a variety of levels. The SDP Fellows canceled generic status update meetings and instead convened a weekly data working group that was empowered to solve complex challenges, such as how to equitably streamline racial and ethnic categories from different agencies. They also created an executive leadership council to communicate with leadership across the agencies. Clarifying roles and responsibilities picked up the project pace.

Finally, they set short, medium, and long-term timelines and planned for risks and obstacles. Leakakos and Zenoni stressed that setting clear, shared expectations of the data-related tasks and target end product is a key part of project management. That includes establishing what data can and cannot do, as well as the limitations imposed by incomplete or poorly housed datasets.

That aspect of the work points to another goal for the SLDS: to positively influence data culture in New Mexico.

“It’s exciting to look to the future,” said Leakakos. “We are now being contacted by legislative groups to participate in analyses that might turn into bills. In the long arc of the system, it was tried and failed over and over again. It was just about to collapse, but we were able to get it back up and running, and now I’m going to talk to a legislative committee about data governance at the state level. It’s a good narrative arc.”

 

Joseph Leakakos is Project Lead for RISE NM. Kathryn Zenoni is Associate Director of Economic and Education Research at Data-Driven Economic Strategies. New Mexico Higher Education Department’s involvement in SDP’s P20W state data working group was sponsored by the Gates Foundation.

For more about SDP’s work on education to workforce pipelines:

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