America can no longer afford an education system that fails to use data effectively to guide decisionmaking. The education sector is facing ever-increasing demands to improve student outcomes, reduce burden, increase efficiency, and improve transparency. These demands cannot be met without the strategic and effective use of data. Due to the tremendous progress across the nation in building statewide longitudinal data systems, states are well positioned to put data to work at all levels of the education sector to meet these goals and improve student achievement. Over the last decade the federal government has been a crucial partner in supporting and accelerating state and local efforts to build the capacity to use data effectively to improve student achievement. The reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) provides a strategic and unique opportunity to better connect data with policy to ensure states, districts, and schools have the data capacity to meet their needs. In fact, nearly every high-priority item in national, federal, state, and local discussions for improving ESEA--and in proposals from across the political spectrum--requires high-quality longitudinal data for its design, implementation, or evaluation. In this publication, the Data Quality Campaign (DQC) recommends three core strategies to embed throughout the reauthorizing ESEA legislation--and eventual federal and state implementation--to support state and local efforts to effectively use data to improve student achievement and system performance: (1) Update and align existing federal data systems investments to help states address current and emerging realities and focus on effective data use; (2) Expect and encourage states to develop the data capacity required to successfully inform, implement, and evaluate priority policies and practices; and (3) Reduce burden, increase efficiency, and improve transparency of appropriate information by further streamlining and improving federal data collection and reporting requirements and providing stakeholders with the information they need to make good decisions. Appended are: (1) Summary of DQC's ESEA Recommendations; (2) State Progress Implementing DQC's 10 Essential Elements & 10 State Actions; and (3) Alignment between DQC's 10 Essential Elements & America COMPETES Act's 12 Elements. (Contains 1 footnote.)