Many school districts in North Carolina are striving to increase proficiency levels in mathematics. With the implementation of the Common Core State Standards, mathematics standards have changed drastically and students are expected to solve complex multi-step word problems and explain how they solved them. As a result, teachers equally need a…

Recent studies have used increasingly complex methodologies to estimate the effect of peer characteristics--race, poverty, and ability--on student achievement. A paper by Hanushek, Kain, and Rivkin using Texas state testing data has received particularly wide attention because it found a large negative effect of school percent black on black math…