Early Childhood And Compliance With Kindergarten Reading Assessment
Texas Education Agency:
The Early Childhood Data System (ECDS) is the state reporting feature in the Texas Student Data System (TSDS) used to collect early childhood data to inform school districts, communities, and early childhood programs about the effectiveness of prekindergarten programs in preparing children for success in kindergarten under Texas Education Code (TEC), §29.161. ECDS will be available October 5, 2015, through December 18, 2015, to collect the required beginning of year kindergarten assessment scores.
Pursuant to TEC, §28.006, Reading Diagnosis, the superintendent, or a designee, of each school district and open-enrollment charter school is required to electronically report each kindergarten student’s raw score on kindergarten reading instruments each year. The kindergarten data collected under this provision will be used to provide state, regional, district, and local aggregate reports of prekindergarten and kindergarten programs and certain federal or government-subsidized childcare and education programs.
Districts administering one of the reading assessments below will be required to provide kindergarten data electronically in the ECDS for the 2015-2016 school year.
LEAs (Local Education Agency) should contact their regional education service center (ESC) or a TSDS-certified vendor for ECDS training and support. Staff in all 20 ESCs have completed training for TSDS and data loading and are able to assist LEAs in this process. If an ESC enters and/or loads the data for the district, district staff must still approve/finalize data in ECDS and will need the ECDS Data Approver role to do so.
An LEA is exempt from the ECDS state reporting if they are using assessments other than those listed above for kindergarten student diagnostics. The LEA should notify TEA of its choice of diagnostic by email at ecds@tea.texas.gov and must also retain the assessment data should the TEA decide to collect the data at a later date.
If you have additional questions about the policy requirements of TEC, §28.006, please contact TEA staff via email at ecds@tea.texas.gov.
