About NCLDS

Purpose

Per NC General Statute 116E (first passed in 2012), the founding purpose of NCLDS is to:

• Facilitate and enable the exchange of student data among agencies and institutions within the State;
• Generate timely and accurate information about student performance that can be used to improve the State's education system and guide decision makers at all levels; and
• Facilitate and enable the linkage of student data and workforce data.

The vision for NCLDS is evolving with the addition of a longer-term goal of incorporating a wider array of data to more comprehensively support our state’s efforts to solve broad, cross-cutting challenges common across our social, education, and workforce sectors.

History

North Carolina has long supported several longitudinal data systems, with some of the earliest dating back to 1992. NCLDS grew out of discussions in the 2000s about ways to better link some of those systems to a vision for a coordinated education-to-workforce data system that was first described in statute (NC General Statute 116E) in 2012. Since then, both the statute and the vision have evolved steadily, with the most recent changes including locating NCLDS at the North Carolina Department of Information Technology’s Government Data Analytics Center in 2016 and formally establishing an NCLDS Team in 2022.