2020 Significant Award: The Stanford Education Data Archive

• In Event: AERA Division D Invited Session for 2019 and 2020 Awardees

Abstract

The Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), part of the Educational Opportunity Project (EOP; https://edopportunity.org), is the product of a decade of methodological research on enabling comparisons of educational achievement data across the U.S. The nationally-comparable school and district achievement data in SEDA is based on roughly 500 million standardized test scores for students in nearly every U.S. public school in third through eighth grade from the 2008-09 through 2017-18 school years. We have made these data publicly available so that anyone who is interested can obtain detailed information about American schools, communities, and student academic achievement. To date, these data have served as the foundation for many studies of educational opportunity in U.S. schools and districts. Research using SEDA is available on the EOP website and has been published in peer-reviewed outlets including AERA Open, Educational Researcher, and The American Educational Research Journal.

Sean Reardon, Ed.D., is the founder and director of the Educational Opportunity Project and the Endowed Professor of Poverty and Inequality in Education at Stanford University. His research investigates the causes, patterns, trends and consequences of social and educational inequality, the effects of educational policy on educational and social inequality, and the use of applied statistical methods for educational research. Sean leads the development of the Stanford Education Data Archive, the first public database of U.S. school achievement and learning.

Erin Fahle, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at St. John's University and the co-director of the Educational Opportunity Project. Erin develops and applies complex statistical methods to study the variation in students’ educational experiences across the U.S., with a focus on understanding the mechanisms that reproduce inequalities. She has contributed to the development of the Stanford Education Data Archive since it's inception and has used the data in multiple studies on educational opportunity in the U.S.

Authors

• Sean F. Reardon, Stanford University

• Andrew Ho, Harvard University

• Benjamin R. Shear, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Erin Michelle Fahle, St. John's University

• Demetra Kalogrides, Stanford University