Third Student Data Requests for 2004 and 2007 Grantee Cohorts (2008-2009)

Appendix I

Student Records Data Collection Plan

Conversion Magnet Schools Evaluation

Student Records Data Collection Plan

April 2007

Student Records Data Collection Plan

The Conversion Magnet School Evaluation requires multiple years of individual and aggregate student data that are only available—or are most efficiently obtained—directly from the districts participating in the study. These data will support analyses of (1) the achievement of neighborhood (“resident”) students in conversion magnet schools and their comparison schools; (2) the achievement of non-resident students who apply for admission to magnet schools through lotteries; and (3) trends in enrollment composition at the school and classroom levels before and after schools convert to magnet status. This Student Records Data Collection Plan provides an overview of the student-level and aggregate data that will be requested from the districts. The accompanying brochure provides additional information on about the evaluation.

Procedures

Student data will be requested in the form of electronic files from participating districts. Each year’s student data collection form will consist of a written request to the district for one or more electronic files containing one record per student. When different types of data are provided in separate files, the records in each file must contain a student ID code to allow information to be linked across files. In order to protect students’ privacy, we will work with each district to create and maintain database with pseudo-ID codes that can replace real student ID codes in the data files they provide to the study.

The study team will work with a contact person in each district’s data processing department to obtain these data. During the first year of the evaluation study, we will request all past years of data through 2006-2007,¹ and in each of the ensuing 3 years one additional year of data (2007-2008 through 2009-2010) will be requested.

Requests for Student-level Data

The scope of the student-level data request to each district will be negotiated during the recruitment process, and will depend on whether the district is contributing only to the study of resident students or to both the resident and non-resident (lottery) studies, as well as on the types of data that the district maintains. We hope to obtain data for all elementary students in some districts to permit more data-intensive analyses and to simplify the data extraction process for districts. However, basic requirements include:

• interrupted time series analyses of resident students—data for 3 years before and 3 years after the conversion date for the students enrolled in the magnet and comparison schools in the study

• experimental study of non-resident students—data for students who applied to each lottery, at least 1 year of post-lottery data (multiple years are desirable) and, if possible, a year of pre-lottery data to serve as a covariate to improve the precision of the results.

The data elements that will be requested are listed in Exhibit 1. If particular data elements listed in Exhibit 1 are not available for a particular district, we will work with the district to identify reasonable proxies.

Exhibit 1. Requested Student-Level Data Elements

Demographic Information

1. Student ID code(s)

2. Age/birthdate

3. Grade

4. Gender

5. Race/ethnic group

6. Free lunch status

7. Reduced-price lunch status

8. Parental education

9. Other local poverty indicator

10. English language status/level

11. Home language

12. Special education status (e.g., IEP) and classification

13. Eligibility for Title 1 services

Enrollment/absences

14. School name/code

15. School address

16. Classroom assignment (e.g., teacher name or code number)

17. Date(s) enrolled in school

18. Attendance/absence days

Test scores

19. English language arts scores on tests administered district-wide

20. Mathematics scores on tests administered district-wide

Residence information

21. Student’s “home” attendance area²

22. Indicator that the student is attending a school outside his/her attendance area

23. Indicator of why the student is enrolled in a school outside his attendance area (e.g., open enrollment choice, magnet)

24. Student’s zip code

Magnet school lottery information

25. To what out-of-attendance-area schools did the child apply and in what preference order, if any?

26. Into which out-of-attendance-area school(s) was the child selected?

Requests for Aggregate Data

Two types of aggregate data will be requested from districts:

Classroom composition data

If classroom assignment information is not available in individual student records, but summary classroom information is maintained by the district, then the summary data will be requested for classrooms in the magnet and comparison schools for the same years that student-level data are collected. The following compositional characteristics would be desirable:

1. Gender

2. Race/ethnic group

3. Free/ reduced price lunch status

4. Parental education

5. Resident status (e.g., attendance area, zip code)

6. English language status/level

7. Home language

8. Special education status—e.g., student has an individualized education plan (IEP)

9. Eligibility for Title 1 services

These data will need to be linked to a classroom and school ID code.

1 In this initial request, districts with 2004 MSAP grants will be asked for data from 2001-2002 through 2006-2007 while districts with 2007 MSAP grants will be asked for data from 2004-2005 through 2006-2007.

2 The study will also obtain attendance area maps from the districts.