Strategic Performance Indicators (SPIs) are summary measures derived from parallel, descriptive analyses conducted across educational agencies. The SPIs are designed to inform agency management and efforts to improve student outcomes. We developed the SPIs to reveal patterns common across partner agencies, to highlight exceptions to those…

Policy makers and researchers are intrigued with but also frequently frustrated by each other. Although these differences are understandable and predictable, it is clear that research on a variety of educational issues has been both influential and valuable in the development of policy and practice. There is much to suggest that researchers and…

Over 2,000 teachers in the state of Washington received reduction in force (RIF) notices across the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years. We link data on these RIF notices to an administrative data set that includes student, teacher, school, and district variables to determine the factors that predict the likelihood of a teacher receiving a RIF…

In the face of school crowding and fears about inequality-inducing summer learning loss, many schools have started to adopt multitrack year-round school calendars, which keep the same number of school days, but spread them more evenly across the calendar year. This change allows schools to support a larger student population by rotating which…

It has been a busy time for the Association of Education Finance and Policy (AEFP). Over the past few years the association has acquired a new name, a new journal, and many new members. The 2012 annual conference, convened in Boston last March, proved to be the largest conference in the association's thirty-seven-year history, with 556 members in…

We analyze patterns of teacher attrition from charter schools and schools in the traditional public sector. Using rich data on students, teachers, and schools in Florida, we estimate teacher effectiveness based on repeated test scores reported at the student level for each teacher over time. Among all teachers, those in charter schools appear more…

School voucher programs have become a prominent aspect of the education policy landscape in the United States. The DC Opportunity Scholarship Program is the only federally funded voucher program in the United States. Since 2004 it has offered publicly funded private school vouchers to nearly four thousand students to attend any of seventy-three…

This article uses longitudinal student-level data from the American University of Sharjah, a large comprehensive university in the Middle East, to examine the relationship between student evaluations of teachers and current and future student achievement. Our model strategies control for the observed and unobserved heterogeneity of students and…

Florida's 1999 A-plus program was a consequential accountability program that embedded vouchers in an accountability regime. Under Florida rules, scores of students in several special education (ESE) and limited English proficient (LEP) categories were not included in the computation of school grades. One might expect these rules to induce F…

Testing of students and computer systems to store, manage, analyze, and report the resulting test data have grown hand-in-hand. Extant research on teacher use of electronically stored data are largely qualitative and focused on the conditions necessary (but not sufficient) for effective teacher data use. Absent from the research is objective…

This paper uses student-level data to investigate how the college application behavior of underrepresented minorities (URMs) changed in response to the 1998 end of affirmative action in admissions at the University of California (UC). We show that all URMs experienced a drop in their probability of admission to at least one UC campus. However, the…

Debate over the design of state and federal accountability systems is an important ongoing issue for policy makers. As we move toward next-generation accountability through No Child Left Behind's (NCLB) waivers and reauthorization drafts, it is important to understand the implementation and effects of key elements of prior accountability systems.…

The assertion that choice-driven competition between schools will improve school quality rests on several largely unexamined assumptions. One is that choice increases the competitive pressure experienced by school leaders. A second is that schools will seek to become more effective in response to competitive pressure. In this article, we use…

Students' experiences and the opportunities they have to learn rest on the quality of education decisions made in each classroom, in each school, in each district, and in each state, federal legislature, and department of education. The role of research and scholarship more broadly in education finance and policy is to inform these decisions for…

We examine earnings records for more than 130,000 classroom teachers employed by Florida public schools between the 2001-2 and 2006-7 school years, roughly 35,000 of whom left the classroom during that time. A majority of those leaving the classroom remained employed by public school districts. Among teachers in grades 4-8 leaving for other…