A Comparative Analysis of Lottery, Charter, and Traditional Based Elementary Schools within the Anchorage school district

The growing popularity of alternative choices to traditional-based public schools—such as public charter/lottery-based schools—has prompted nationwide research. In Anchorage, however, there are few quantitative studies that compare student performance across traditional public schools, charter schools, and lottery-based schools. The purpose of this project is to create and analyze panel data for all public elementary schools within the Anchorage School District and compare the achievement of charter/lottery with traditional-based schools. This will be done using public Terra Nova and SBA data from ASD for the years 2007–2010 in addition to U.S. Census data. Data will be imported into Stata, a robust statistical software application, and regression techniques will be used to compare student Terra Nova and SBA scores while controlling for other factors that also influence test scores.