This technical report provides additional details about the information and analyses presented in Charter School Performance Similar to Other Public Schools; Accountability Needs Improvement, Report No. 05-21. These reports assess the performance of students attending charter schools in the 2003-04 school year. We analyzed six years of Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) results to assess students' proficiency in math and reading before they entered a charter school, a year after they had attended their charter school, and their annual learning gains while in the charter school.

Our major findings were that, on average, charter school students were slightly behind academically before entering charter schools compared to students in traditional public schools; that charter school students were thus more likely than other public school students to not meet grade-level expectations; and the academic learning gains of charter school students were generally comparable to those of traditional public school students, although high school students at the lowest academic levels made slightly greater learning gains in charter schools than in traditional public schools. These findings are discussed in detail in our companion report.

• This technical report provides information on
• the data sources used in our analyses,
• the methodology used to analyze whether students met grade-level expectations,
• the rationale and statistical models used to analyze student learning gains, and
• caveats and additional statistical analyses supporting the learning gains analyses.