As college-bound high school seniors know, the ACT examination is possibly the single most important assessment students take during their academic careers. ACT scores can determine college entrance, scholarship dollars, and whether students will be placed in remedial courses. Parents pay large sums of money to prepare their children for this…

This report looks at student achievement levels in Arkansas school districts disaggregated by district poverty and by the district's performance relative to other districts. We estimated district performance statistics by subject and grade level (4, 8, and 11-12) for longitudinal student cohorts, using statistical models that adjusted for district…

Educators and policymakers have set a goal that all students graduate from high school ready for college and careers. A substantial body of research supports the idea that the path to college and career readiness begins well before middle and high school. In an earlier policy report, ACT examined the percentage of academically far off track…

Background: Cluster-randomized experiments that assign intact groups such as schools or school districts to treatment conditions are increasingly common in educational research. Such experiments are inherently multilevel designs whose sensitivity (statistical power and precision of estimates) depends on the variance decomposition across levels.…

Using a unique dataset, this dissertation analyzes the relationship between observable teacher characteristics and teacher effectiveness. Effectiveness is measured as a teacher's ability to improve student achievement on a standardized test. This analysis focuses on teachers of math and science at the elementary and middle school levels, as well…

This year the Center on Education Policy (CEP) analyzed data on the achievement of different groups of students in two distinct ways. First, it looked at grade 4 test results to determine whether the performance of various groups improved at three achievement levels--basic and above, proficient and above, and advanced. Second, it looked at gaps…