State Education Contextual Data Resource (S-ECDR)

I. Rationale for Measuring State Education Contexts In the United States, educational attainment increased over the 20th century,1 while variation in state and federal investment in public education led to substantial differences in the quality and context of schooling across time and place. Yet data on education quality and context prior to 1975 remain limited. To address this gap, our team curated an open-source database – the State Education Contextual Data Resource (SECDR) – for researchers studying how education context and quality shapes a wide range of outcomes among older U.S. adults who attended school between 1919/20 and 1973/74. The S-ECDR captures 43 key analytic indicators of state-level education context and quality spanning 1919/20-1973/74, along with supplementary variables such as CPI adjusted and flag variables. These data can be linked to population-based studies of U.S. adults who reported their childhood residence and attended school during this period, allowing new analyses of K-12 educational experiences and their long-term implications for well-being. The S-ECDR is also well-suited for analyses that wish to account for state level variation in public education investment that coincided with major policy changes during this era