Status
Current
Location

Statewide

TEAM
Senior Fellow
Data and Outcomes Analyst
Founder and Executive Director

Illinois Longitudinal Data System

The Illinois Longitudinal Data System (ILDS) provides the governance and technical systems that support the integration of longitudinal data across participating Illinois state agencies. Focusing on the cradle to career spectrum, the ILDS:

  • aligns and coordinates agency data and research priorities;
  • enables the secure and efficient linkage of individual-level data across selected agency data sets via its Master Client Index (MCI); and
  • facilitates the access and use of agency data by researchers and other external parties.

Our Role

EdSystems supports the governance of the ILDS, and our team has played a lead role in laying the legal foundation and securing the funding necessary to support the system from its outset. We partner both with participating state agencies in identifying inter-agency priorities and projects and with the Centralized Demographic Dataset Administrator, an NIU-based entity that maintains the MCI. We also liaise with researchers and other prospective data users interested in requesting agencies’ individual-level data.

The Latest

News

Executive Director Transition Announcement

Education Systems Center at NIU (EdSystems) today announces that Founder and Executive Director Jonathan Furr will be transitioning from his role as of June 2023 after nearly eleven years of building and leading the organization. Jon will be pursuing new professional opportunities, which he will share in the coming weeks.

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Advancing Racial Equity

Placing Our Big Bets Through 2025 and Beyond

EdSystems is coalescing around five new goals, which we call our Big Bets, to ensure that our state’s education and workforce systems truly lessen racial inequities and lead to tangible progress for our Black and Latinx students that have for far too long been underserved by these systems.

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