This report examines Albuquerque Public Schools (APS) students’ high school performance, college enrollment, and college persistence patterns, and compares these patterns across a variety of student characteristics and academic experiences. To conduct the analyses, researchers connected APS administrative student data (including demographics and test scores) to college enrollment records and to student surveys conducted by SDP Data Fellows at several APS high schools. These data sources allowed the diagnostic to track students’ progress through high school to graduation, and to examine their college-going aspirations and actual college outcomes.

The Human Capital Diagnostic is the result of a partnership between SDP and APS designed to bring data to bear on policy and management decisions to improve student outcomes. Researchers connected student demographics and test scores to teacher human resource data and calculated objective measures of teacher effectiveness that are linked to teacher characteristics. The diagnostic analyses leverage these measures of effectiveness to explore their relationship with characteristics of teachers, schools, and students. They are not intended to draw conclusions about the contribution made by any individual teacher but rather to understand overall district trends.