Tobias, Justin

The American Statistician Vol. 58 (2004)

The 1999 Public Schools Accountability Act
set forth the Academic Performance Index (API)
to assess the performance of California's
public schools. Under the Governor's Performance
Awards program, California schools showing adequate
improvement in API scores become eligible for
state funding. This paper investigates the
rule used by California which defines awards
eligibility and determines if this rule is
consistent with the act of
rewarding schools that are performing
better than expected. In addition, we
introduce and estimate a multilevel hierarchical
model to determine those school districts and
counties that demonstrated the best performance
over the 2000-2001 period.