Validating the SEDA Measures of District Educational Opportunities

The Stanford Educational Data Archive (SEDA) is the first dataset to allow comparisons of district academic achievement and growth from grades 3 to 8 across the United States, shining a light on the distribution of educational opportunities. This study describes a convergent validity analysis of the SEDA growth estimates in mathematics and English Language Arts (ELA) by comparing the SEDA estimates against estimates derived from NWEA’s MAP Growth assessments. We find strong precision-adjusted correlations between growth estimates from SEDA and MAP Growth in math (.90) and ELA (.82). We also find that the discrepancy between the growth estimates in ELA is slightly more pronounced in high-SES districts. Our analyses indicate a high degree of congruence between the SEDA estimates and estimates derived from the vertically-scaled MAP Growth assessment. However, small systematic discrepancies imply that the SEDA growth estimates are less likely to generalize to estimates obtained through MAP Growth in some states.