As a research and technical assistance organization, CNA Education would be the last to deny the importance of good data and the first to applaud efforts to improve the quality and scope of the data available. Solid data are critical to CNA's mission to further general understanding of the efficacy of specific education reform initiatives and to…

We use a rich administrative dataset from North Carolina to explore questions related to the relationship between teacher characteristics and credentials on the one hand and student achievement on the other. Though the basic questions underlying this research are not new--and, indeed, have been explored in many papers over the years within the…

Global economic transformations have never been as dramatic as in the twentieth century. Most countries have experienced radical changes in the standards of income per capita, technology, fertility, mortality, income inequality and the extent of democracy in the course of the past century. It is the goal of many disciplines--economics, history,…

In order to examine the relationship between school size and achievement, a study was conducted using longitudinal achievement data from North Carolina for three separate cohorts of public school students (one elementary, one middle and one high school). Results revealed several interactions between size and student characteristics, all of which…

In this article, John Forbes, administrative analyst for the 80,000-student Fresno Unified School District in Fresno, and Terrence Young, chief information officer for the 70,000-student Guilford Country Schools in Greensboro, North Carolina, share their strategies for getting staff on board with Web-based data systems. These are the strategies:…