During the 2014-15 school year, almost 500 new public charter schools opened. An estimated 348,000 additional students were attending public charter schools in the 2014-15 school year compared with the previous school year. With the addition of new charter schools and students, there are now more than 6,700 public charter schools enrolling about…

Recently, studies have adopted fixed effects modeling to identify the returns to college. This method has the advantage over ordinary least squares estimates in that unobservable, individual-level characteristics that may bias the estimated returns are differenced out. But the method requires extensive longitudinal data and involves complex…

Background: Evaluating diversity, inclusivity, and equity remains both a prevalent topic in education and a difficult challenge for most evaluators. Traditional metrics used to evaluate these constructs include questionnaires, focus groups, and anonymous comment solicitations. While each of these approaches offer value, they also possess a number…

The Mathematics Fluency and Calculation Tests (MFaCTs) are a series of measures designed to assess for arithmetic calculation skills and calculation fluency in children ages 6 through 18. There are five main purposes of the MFaCTs: (1) identifying students who are behind in basic math fact automaticity; (2) evaluating possible delays in arithmetic…

The authors offer a classification technique to make a quantitative skills rubric more operational, with the groupings of multiple-choice questions to match the student learning levels in knowledge, calculation, quantitative reasoning, and analysis. The authors applied this classification technique to the mid-term exams of an introductory finance…

On August 14, 2010, the "Los Angeles Times" published the results of a statistical analysis of student test data to provide information about elementary schools and teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). The analysis, covering the period from 2003 to 2009, was put forward as an evaluation of the effects of schools…

This technical report summarizes the third independent factor analysis of the SERU/UCUES questionnaire responses of students with majors. The 2009 solution employed the same quantitative analysis used in the prior solutions--varimax orthogonal rotation to determine principal components followed by promax oblique rotation to identify…

We used a random-assignment experiment in Los Angeles Unified School District to evaluate various non-experimental methods for estimating teacher effects on student test scores. Having estimated teacher effects during a pre-experimental period, we used these estimates to predict student achievement following random assignment of teachers to…

Six of California's largest urban school districts have joined together in the Partnership for Urban Education Research (PUER), to address the most pressing issues in urban education. The six PUER districts have agreed to work together to increase data availability, enhance internal research capacity, and promote collaboration and information…

After years of implementing Interactive Math, many California school districts have bowed to parental pressure and returned to a traditional mathematics curriculum. Reforms are catching on in Texas, Ohio, Arkansas, South Carolina, and New Jersey. The white/minority SAT score gap remains wide. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics 1990…

This report presents the results of the professional judgment component of a seven month project undertaken by American Institutes for Research (AIR) to answer the following question: What is the cost of providing all California public school students with access to the California content standards, thereby achieving appropriate levels of…

The Teacher Load Index, a simplified method of comparing the teaching load of individuals in the California junior and community colleges, is presented in this report. First, the load measurement problem is addressed, revealing the inadequacies of the Credit Unit and the Weekly Student Contact Hour systems for measuring teacher load. Then, a…

Assessment data are presented from a representative sample of California public school students in grades 4 through 12 in 115 school districts as of December, 1986. The sample represents 5% of the state's enrollment in grades 4 through 12. Students were tested in reading comprehension, writing, and computation. In grade 12, 9,250 students took one…

California's Pupil Proficiency Law requires each local school district to adopt standards of proficiency in the basic skills of reading comprehension, writing, and computation. Students are to be assessed in grades 4-11. Students not making sufficient progress towards meeting the district's standards are to be provided with remedial programs, and…