Predicting Success, Preventing Failure: An Investigation of the California High School Exit Exam

Examines early indicators that identify fourth-grade students in San Diego who are at risk of failing the California High School Exit Exam, discusses implications for when and how to intervene to address those factors, and makes policy recommendations

Lessons in Reading Reform: Finding What Works

Evaluates elements of reforms designed to improve reading scores among students identified as lagging behind, including extended-length English classes and school years. Considers the role of teachers' experience, lessons learned, and policy implications

Passing the California High School Exit Exam: Have Recent Policies Improved Student Performance?

This report evaluates the effectiveness of three support services in helping struggling students pass the California High School Exit Examination (CAHSEE). The report highlights the need to help students before they first take the exam in grade 10 and introduces the CAHSEE Early Warning Model, a forecasting tool to identify at-risk students in earlier grades

Carefully designed multiple choice tests can help teachers to quickly determine what students don't understand

Over the last 20 years, US schools have widely adopted annual student testing, a move which many researchers believe may have been of little benefit to students' educational outcomes. Julian R. Betts, Youjin Hahn and Andrew C. Zau examine the impact of a different type of mathematics testing - one which is aimed at determining students' strengths and weaknesses in math. They find that since 2000 the Mathematics Diagnostic Testing Project in California’s second largest school district has increased student’s state test score by up to 4 percentage points. They attribute these increases to the detailed information and insights into student performance the tests provide compared to more traditional examinations

Does Diagnostic Math Testing Improve Student Learning?

California, like all other states, has adopted a sweeping school accountability system that features annual testing of students. The main state test, the California Standards Test (CST), serves multiple goals, the foremost of which is to measure student proficiency and to determine whether schools receive interventions and sanctions set out in the federal No Child Left Behind law. There is another type of test, freely available to middle and high school math teachers throughout California, which holds two key advantages over the CST math tests. The Mathematics Diagnostic Testing Project (MDTP) offers course-specific assessments that provide teachers with timely feedback on their students’ strengths and weaknesses in mathematics, often returning feedback to teachers on individual students and the entire class within a week of testing. In this way, teachers can quickly act on what they learn about their students ’ mathematics skills. A second advantage of the MDTP tests is that they provide more detailed feedback about each student’s areas of strength and weakness than do the CST mathematics tests. The MDTP attempts to “diagnose”, not just “report.” This study examines the effect of MDTP testing on students ’ mathematics achievement, using detailed student-level data from the San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD), the second largest district in California. The MDTP has in fact been used in two ways in the district. First, many math teachers hav

Determinants of Student Achievement: New Evidence from

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references

The Social Cost of Open Enrollment as a School Choice Policy

We evaluate the integrating and segregating effects of school choice in a large, urban school district. Our findings, based on applications for fall 2001, suggest that open enrollment, a school-choice program that does not have explicit integrative objectives and does not provide busing, segregates students along three socioeconomic dimensions – race/ethnicity, student achievement and parental-education status. Using information on expenditures to promote integration at the district, we back out estimates of the social cost of open enrollment realized in terms of student segregation. Our social-cost estimates range widely depending on the weights that we place on the different dimensions of integration. However, even using conservative valuations of the different integrative measures suggests a social cost at this single district of over 3.4 million dollars (in year-2000 dollars). When considered in the context of the nation as a whole, where open- enrollment programs are commonplace, this estimate from a single district is substantial. However, we also note that there may be benefits not related to integration that counterbalance some or all of these costs.school choice, open enrollment, integration, segregation, segregation costs