SanDERA Mission Statement

The San Diego Education Research Alliance (SanDERA) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) conducts rigorous and relevant research that contributes to the development of education policy and informs, supports, and sustains high-quality educational opportunities for all students in San Diego and beyond.

Welcome from the Executive Director and Director

Julian Betts and Karen Bachofer

The UCSD Department of Economics has exciting news to share! The San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) and the Department of Economics have created a new research entity called the San Diego Education Research Alliance at UCSD (SanDERA). SanDERA (sahn-dare-ah) builds on a decade-long collaborative research relationship between UCSD and SDUSD that has resulted in the publication of more than fifteen books and papers on a variety of topics ranging from the determinants of student achievement and school choice to detailed evaluations of major reading reforms implemented in San Diego and a study of the effects of the California High School Exit Exam.

SanDERA is led by an Executive Committee made up of Julian Betts, professor and former chair of the Department of Economics at UCSD, who also serves as the Executive Director of SanDERA, Karen Volz Bachofer, Ph.D., former Executive Director of SDUSD’s Research and Evaluation Division and now the Director of SanDERA, Andrew Zau, SanDERA’s Senior Statistician, Ron Rode, Executive Director of the Office of Accountability at SDUSD, and Peter Bell, Ph.D., Director of SDUSD’s Research and Reporting Department.

We welcome you to the SanDERA website and hope you will visit often to see what SanDERA is up to.

Featured Publication

Cory Koedel and Julian R. Betts, “Education Finance and Policy” (Winter 2011)

Koedel and Betts replicate some striking findings by Jesse Rothstein of UC Berkeley, who discovered (using North Carolina data) that, not only does a student’s current teacher forecast that student’s test score gains in the current year, so does next year’s teacher.  Of course, although next year’s teacher predicts current year gains, this cannot be a causal relationship. 

Rothstein’s finding raises serious doubts about whether the correlation between the current year teacher and current year gains say anything about teacher effectiveness.  Koedel and Betts replicate this result closely using data from San Diego.  However, they also find a solution.  Once they follow several years of students through a teacher’s classroom, rather than a single cohort of students, it is no longer the case that a student’s future teacher is predictive of how well the student performs in a given school year. 

This paper was quoted in a recent “Education Week” cover story on value-added measures of teacher effectiveness.