Public data posted by the California Department of Education has been incomplete, often outdated and occasionally inaccurate, forcing legislators to pass laws based on old data, researchers to delay inquiries and journalists to grapple with inaccurate information. Californians, living in a state known globally as a center of innovation and technology, have had to cope with a state education agency that has admittedly lacked the staffing and the policies to provide much-needed data, EdSource reporting has found.  As a result, there are gaps in the knowledge needed by lawmakers, researchers, journalists and others to evaluate state programs and policies, from teacher demographics, to how many English learners become fluent in English each year, to how districts have spent a $50 million court settlement to improve early literacy. Alix Gallagher, the director of strategic partnerships at Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), says the lack of data on universal transitional kindergarten makes it unclear whether the state is optimizing the annual investment it is making in the grade. California will spend an estimated $3 billion a year by 2025-26, when universal transitional kindergarten (TK) will be offered to all 4-year-olds, Gallagher wrote in a commentary on the PACE website. The state should collect data on the features of transitional kindergarten programs and on student outcomes from transitional kindergarten through second grade, to better understand the effectiveness of transitional kindergarten, she wrote. “Right now there isn’t publicly available data for roughly the first third of a kid’s career in the public schools,” Gallagher told EdSource. “We now have universal access to TK, kindergarten, first, second and third grades. And, at the end of third grade, kids take the SBAC (Smarter Balanced Assessment). And that’s the first time, as a system, we know anything about kids’ learning.”