Glossary of TSDS Terminology

  A – E

ADA – The Americans with Disabilities Act. The ADA prohibits discrimination on the basis of workers' disabilities. The act is designed to protect the rights of people with virtually any physical or mental disability.

ARRA – American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (2009) – source of funds for the second SLDS grant funding TSDS.

AskTED – Texas Education Directory - application and public web interface that stores ESC, LEA, and campus organization information, such as address, URL, and principal or superintendent.

Authentication and authorization – security processes in which a user's identity is verified and that user is assigned certain access rights within a system.

BPD Business Partner Directory – the application that stores organization information for private entities—such as private prekindergartens, educator preparation program, and universities.

CDM – Core Data Mart – the main data repository for the Core Collection application. 

CBGT Census Block Group Tool

Census Block Group – A Census Block Group is a geographical unit used by the United States Census Bureau. It is the smallest geographical unit for which the bureau publishes sample data, such as data that is only collected from a fraction of all households.

Class Roster – A data collection in TSDS Core that correlates educators, course sections, and students.

Core Collection – An application that houses TSDS data collections other than PEIMS and studentGPS®.

COTS – Commercial off-the-shelf product – a standard, pre-made software product, like Microsoft Word or SAS analytics software, in contrast to custom-developed solutions.

Data Collection (TSDS) – A group of related data elements that is submitted to TEA for a particular purpose (usually legislatively mandated); is managed by a program area; and follows a shared set of policies, guidelines, and workflows. Data for a data collection may be certified and submitted to TEA via one or more submissions per year.  ECDS, PEIMS, RFT, and SPPI-14 are all data collections.  A data collection may consist of one or more official data submissions to TEA. 

Data Load  Copying of data from the user’s local system to the ODS.

Data mart – a subset of a data warehouse that provides access to data for a particular subsystem or program area.

Data Promotion – Copying of data from the ODS to the data marts.  Promotion and Preparation are comparable, except that promotion is more customizable.

Data warehouse – a central repository of data used for reporting and analysis.

DCD – District Connections Database – an older term for the EDW.

DDM – Dashboard Data Mart (stores data for studentGPS®).

DGB – Data Governance Board – responsible for oversight of the data elements collected by TEA.

DLP – Double Line Partners – MSDF’s subcontractor, developed the studentGPS® Dashboards. 

DTU – Data Transfer Utility – the software that moves TEDS-compliant data extracts from the local system to the ODS

ECDS – Early Childhood Data System - an application in the Core Collection that manages early childhood data reporting.

Early adopters – LEAs that volunteered to participate in the first phase of TSDS deployment (after the LPR prototypes).

Ed-Fi – MSDF’s national education data standards, which TEA adapted for TSDS (see “TEDS”).

EDIT+ – TEA's legacy system for collecting PEIMS data. EDIT+ will be retired once all Texas LEAs have migrated to TSDS PEIMS.

eDMeScholar Data Manager – software that allows LEAs to load data to TSDS.

EDWEducation Data Warehouse – the database that houses all of the data for TSDS—subdivided into various data marts and data stores.

EE – Early Education.

ESC – Education Service Center – 20 regional centers that provide administrative and technical support to Texas LEAs, including support for TSDS.

ETL – extract, transform, load – the process of moving data from one component of TSDS to another.

EXYR – The Extended Year Submission for the PEIMS data collection.

FALL – The Fall Submission for the PEIMS data collection or for the Class Roster data collection.

FSP – The Foundation School Program (FSP) is a state program that establishes the amount of state and local funding due to school districts under the Texas school finance law. 

FERPAFamily Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (20 U.S.C. § 1232g; 34 CFR Part 99) - a Federal law that protects the privacy of student education records. The law applies to all schools that receive funds under an applicable program of the U.S. Department of Education. 

GED – General Education Development. A certification of high-school level academic skills.

GRV – Global Reports Viewer. A centralized module for generating reports from across TSDS.

HIPAA – Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 – a set of national standards for the protection of individuals' health information.

IMT – Incident Management Tool – an application that allows end users to submit issues, or "incidents" regarding the functioning of a piece of software. It allows the software owners to track all incidents in a single system, and maintain records of incidents and solutions. The IMT for TSDS is called TIMS.

JIRA – The company that produces TIMS.

KG – Kindergarten. May refer to kindergarten-level schooling generally, or may refer specifically to the KG Submission in the ECDS data collection.

L –  R

LEA – local education agency – a Texas school district or charter school.

LPR – limited production release – a prototype release of studentGPS® Dashboards to seven participating LEAs.

MDYR – The Midyear Submission for the PEIMS data collection.

MOU – Memorandum of Understanding – a formal agreement between two parties that has less force than a contract.

MSDF – Michael and Susan Dell Foundation – a major grantor and partner for TSDS.

ODSOperational Data Store – the central data repository within the EDW to which users load their data; passes district data to the various subsystems of TSDS.

PDMPEIMS Data Mart – a data mart within the EDW that houses the data for the TSDS PEIMS application.

PEIMSPublic Education Information Management System – the main education data collection system for the state of Texas.

PET – Person Enrollment Tracker.  A legacy system that allows LEAs to search for leavers.

PID – Person Identification Database – the legacy identification number system, it will be replaced in the future by the UID system.

RF – A Residential facility (RF) provides 24-hour custody or care of students 22 years of age or younger for detention, treatment, foster care, or any non-educational purpose.

RFI/RFO – Request for Information/Offer – a formal opportunity for vendors to provide information or feedback (RFI) or to bid on a project (RFO).

RFO – Request for Offers. A formal, structured invitation to vendors for the supply of products or services. The Texas state RFO process is circumscribed by very specific regulations to ensure that such competition for the use of public money is open, fair, and free from bribery and nepotism.

RFT – The Residential Facility Tracker (RFT) is a data collection in TSDS Core that manages data on special education students who are placed in residential facilities.

S –  Z

SAT – Scholastic Assessment Test. A standardized test used for college admittance.

SEDS – Statewide Education Data System.

SELA – Special Education Language Acquisition is a data collection in TSDS Core that gathers information about special education students eight years of age or younger who are deaf or hard of hearing, and the tools or assessments they utilize. 

SIS – student information system – a software application that allows LEAs to store, manage, and report their education data.

SLDS – statewide longitudinal data system – a statewide collection that tracks student performance data across time. TSDS received awards from two SLDS (federal grant) programs.

SPPI – State Performance Plan Indicator 14. A data collection in TSDS Core that gathers contact information for special education students who have left the public school system. The contact information is used to comply with federal guidelines requiring Texas to sample special education leavers and identify the kind of careers/education/training they pursue after leaving the public school system.

SRS – Software Requirements Specifications – a document that lists the requirements for a software development or maintenance project.

SSIS – statewide student information system  – one of 2 SISs (Skyward & TCC) that were enhanced per TEA requirements to offer a fuller feature set at a pre-negotiated price – part of the original TSDS project it was optional for LEAs.

STAAR – State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness – a series of state-mandated standardized tests used in Texas public primary and secondary schools. Used to assess a student's achievements and knowledge learned in that grade level.

Staging area – an LEA's local directory where extracts are posted for pickup by the Operational Data Store.

Stakeholder – in the context of TSDS this is anyone who is affected by the TSDS project; from direct system users, like teachers, to people who are indirectly affected by project outcomes, such as parents or policy makers.

studentGPS® Dashboards – “The dashboards” – a data mining system that was previously available as part of TSDS that is no longer supported for educators and administrators to help them spot trends and adjust instruction.

Subcategory – Within a category of data, subcategory refers to the next lower level grouping of data components. 

Submission – A submission is a subset of a data collection.  It consists of some or all of the data elements in a collection, submitted on a given deadline.  In ECDS, PK and KG are submissions.  In PEIMS, FALL, MDYR, SUMR, and EXYR are submissions.  RFT and SPPI-14 each have only one YRLY submission.

Submission Instance – A completed and certified version of the data elements needed for a submission that must be finalized by a particular deadline within a submission period.At the time of writing, PEIMS is the only data collection that uses multiple submission instances: it has separate deadlines for a First Submission and a Resubmission within each submission period.Only one submission instance—the latest certified instance—is saved to the permanent archive. However, it is possible that in future other data collections may need submissions with instances that have different data requirements from each other.

SUMR – The Summer Submission for the PEIMS data collection.

TDCARSI – The IBM study of PEIMS whose recommendations formed the basis for the TSDS project.

TEA – Texas Education Agency.

TEAL – TEA Login – TEA’s security system based on IBM Tivoli products, currently being incrementally implemented for all TEA software that is accessed by the field (replaces TEASE).

TEDSTexas Education Data Standards – the data standards, business rules, and validations that govern how data must be formatted for loading to TSDS. Based on MSDF’s national Ed-Fi standards.

Texas Project Share – a collection of Web 2.0 tools and applications that allow educators to share resources and collaborate.

TPEIRTexas Public Education Information Resource – a website that reports aggregated, anonymous education data for researchers and the general public.

TREx – Texas Records Exchange - an application that allows school districts to request and receive student records and send transcripts to Texas public colleges and universities.

    TSDS – The Texas Student Data System - a platform of projects and systems that unifies TEA’s data collection system, starting with its flagship program, PEIMS. It includes multiple data collections in the Core application, a person identity manager (Unique ID); the voluntary state-sponsored student information systems, and enhancements to the public reporting system, TPEIR.

    TWEDS – TSDS Web-Enabled Data Standards – an online portal that will allow users to search and download TEDS.

    UI – user interface. 

    UIDUnique ID – refers both to the eScholar application that will manage identification numbers for TSDS and to an individual identification number in that system.

    Validation Tool – the downloadable application that replaces and expands on the legacy XML Checker. The new tool checks a range of validations; data type, data pattern, pattern, mandatory elements, code table validations, domain of values, referential integrity, primary key checks, and business rules.

    WNTR – The Winter Submission for the Class Roster data collection.

    XML – eXtensible Markup Language – a markup language for encoding data over the internet. TEDS are XML-based data standards.

    XSD – XML Schema Definition – a set of rules to which an XML document must conform in order to be considered 'valid.' In TSDS, the XSD files are the templates for formatting each TEDS interchanges' XML files.

    YRLY – Yearly typically identifies a reporting period for a collection during a school year.