Consider the high-priority challenges facing education stakeholders today, such as measuring teacher effectiveness, implementing the Common Core State Standards, aligning K-12 and postsecondary education efforts with workforce demands, efficiently allocating resources, and ensuring that students stay on track to success. These efforts all rely on the efficient collection, management, and use of education data--and stakeholder confidence in those data, particularly if they will be used for high-stakes personnel, accountability, or other decisions. Over the last decade, state, federal, and private investments of political will and resources have contributed to significant progress in building robust statewide longitudinal data systems. Attention is now shifting--as it should be--to the work of ensuring that data are used by stakeholders to answer critical questions and inform decisionmaking from the kitchen table to the classroom to the state capitol. In the absence of common data standards that ensure the quality, comparability, and efficient sharing of data, these efforts' impact will be limited and their implementation costly and ineffective. (Contains 8 endnotes.)