Countless education experts and reports have noted that – in the words of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's own Committee on Education Excellence – California has "woefully inadequate data systems that lag behind those of nearly every other state in the nation."

One example illustrates the problem: When a student transfers between school districts, it can take weeks or months for records to arrive. Here's another: The state can't even accurately measure its dropout rate.

The problem isn't a scarcity of information. School districts must respond to multiple, duplicative data requests for 125 different data collections. But the information is in "disconnected silos" that prevent sharing.

What is holding the state back? As one report diplomatically put it, "California needs influential education data champions."

Schwarzenegger seemed poised to be such a champion. In his State of the State address in January, he said the first priority of his 2008 Year of Education to would be to "fund, link and determine additional data elements" for an ambitious education data system. A key part of that would be an Education Data Commission that would make recommendations within six to eight months for the design and cost of a comprehensive data system.

So where is the Education Data Commission that Schwarzenegger announced in the State of the State address? No members have been named, and no work has begun.

In the meantime, the Gates and Hewlett Foundations have funded a consulting team to produce a report for the California Department of Education that will map out the education data already collected by the state, what data are missing, how to get quality data and what it would cost.

That's a start. But this report cannot hash out important political issues that have hampered California's data collection in the past. How to link prekindergarten, K-12, higher education, work force and other data currently collected by multiple agencies? How to link student and teacher data? How to give data to researchers and local school districts in a way that protects the privacy of individual students? How to foster exchange of data among and between school districts? How to give teachers data they can use in the classroom? Who will control an expanded, interagency set of data?

That's why an independent data commission is needed.

In the absence of leadership by Schwarzenegger, Sens. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, and Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, have introduced the Education Data and Information Act of 2008 (Senate Bill 1298). It would set up a 19-member Education Data Governing Board (10 appointed by the governor, four by the speaker of the Assembly, four by the Senate Rules Committee and one representing the superintendent of public instruction). This board would develop a timetable for a system of connecting records from prekindergarten through higher education and into the work force, as other states have done.

At the Senate Education Committee hearing on Wednesday, Schwarzenegger should support SB 1298. Statewide, there's more momentum than ever for getting this done. It's time for the governor to put some muscle behind overcoming the bureaucratic hurdles that have kept California behind other states.