*1.1. The Role of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)*

In 1961, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) was founded to help spur economic growth and world trade, including gathering educational data to inform how countries can guide the development of schools and school systems [7]. During its early years, the OECD administered international educational surveys to 20 founding members about topics such as educational budgeting, teacher recruitment, student engagement, and the establishment of new schools [6]. However, in the late 1990s and the early 2000s during the dot-com boom, the OECD began gathering much more comprehensive data from member nations and their schools, including the total number of educational personnel (teachers, administrators, etc.) in 1998, student count and age of enrolled students in 2000, and graduation rates and student–teacher ratios in 2005 [8]. Now, the OECD has 38 full members across the world and publishes some of the most comprehensive international education reports available [6]. The same approach to data collection and aggregation has been adopted at the continent and country levels as well.

**Citation:** Taylor, Z.W.; Kugiya, J.; Charran, C.; Childs, J. Building Equitable Education Datasets for Developing Nations: Equity-Minded Data Collection and Disaggregation to Improve Schools, Districts, and Communities. *Educ. Sci.* **2023**, *13*, 348. https://doi.org/10.3390/ educsci13040348

Academic Editor: Meihua Liu

Received: 21 February 2023 Revised: 16 March 2023 Accepted: 24 March 2023 Published: 28 March 2023

**Copyright:** © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

## *1.2. The European Union (EU)*

When the European Union (EU) was established in 1993, individual EU member states were tasked with administering and measuring their own educational systems, leading to several decades of misalignment between different member states and no common dataset for EU leaders to make data-driven educational decisions [3]. However, EU leaders encouraged member states to participate in surveys administered by the OECD, while creating the "'Open Methods of Coordination' (OMC) for policies in social fields, including education and training" [3] [p. 989]. Later, the EU devised the "Education and Training 2020 strategy (ET2020), as part of the Europe 2020", which prioritized cross-country collaboration and information sharing to improve educational outcomes [3] [p. 990]. This led to the creation of the European Commission, which houses educational information and data across all EU member states [9]. These organizations ultimately allowed independent researchers to explore relationships between education outcomes and its citizenry, informing how the EU could improve its interconnected educational systems [4].
