About this project
The Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA) aims to harness data to improve educational opportunity.
Background
The Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA) is an initiative aimed at harnessing data to help scholars, policymakers, educators, and parents learn how to improve educational opportunity for all children.
Racial, socioeconomic, and gender disparities in academic performance and educational attainment are stubborn features of the U.S. educational system.These disparities are neither inevitable nor immutable, however. They have been produced by—and so may also be reduced by—a welter of social and economic policies, social norms and patterns of interaction, and the organization of American schooling.
SEDA includes a range of detailed data on educational conditions, contexts, and outcomes in school districts and counties across the United States. It includes measures of academic achievement and achievement gaps for school districts and counties, as well as district-level measures of racial and socioeconomic composition, racial and socioeconomic segregation patterns, and other features of the schooling system. The data are publicly available here, so that anyone can obtain detailed information about American schools, communities, and student success.
We hope that researchers will use the data to generate evidence about what policies and contexts are most effective at increasing educational opportunity, and that such evidence will inform educational policy and practices.
Who We Are
SEDA Development Team
Erin M. Fahle
Executive Director
Erin Fahle is the Executive Director of the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University. Her research explores how social and school context affects gender, racial/ethnic, and socioeconomic inequalities in student’s access to educational opportunities and subsequent achievement. Dr. Fahle’s goal is to help states, districts, and schools identify areas for policy and practice interventions that can improve the educational circumstances of children across the U.S. She believes deeply that this work must be done in partnership with school leaders and is committed to designing research that reflects their perspectives. Her work has been published in Educational Researcher and the American Educational Research Journal and featured in media outlets including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and NPR. Dr. Fahle holds a Ph.D. in Education Policy from Stanford University, as well as a B.S. in Mathematics (2008) and a M.S. in Applied Mathematics and Statistics (2009) from Georgetown University. She was formerly an Assistant Professor at St. John’s University and a Research Scientist at NWEA.
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Sean Reardon
Faculty Director
Sean Reardon is the endowed Professor of Poverty and Inequality in Education and is Professor (by courtesy) of Sociology at Stanford University. His research focuses on the causes, patterns, trends, and consequences of social and educational inequality, the effects of educational policy on educational and social inequality, and in applied statistical methods for educational research. Reardon is the developer of the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA). Professor Reardon received his doctorate in education in 1997 from Harvard University. He is a member of the National Academy of Education and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Andrew Ho
Professor of Education, Harvard University
Andrew Ho is the Charles William Eliot Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is a psychometrician whose research aims to improve the design, use, and interpretation of test scores in educational policy and practice. Ho is known for his research documenting the misuse of proficiency-based statistics in state and federal policy analysis. He has also clarified properties of student growth models for both technical and general audiences. His scholarship advocates for designing evaluative metrics to achieve multiple criteria: metrics must be accurate, but also transparent to target audiences and resistant to inflation under perverse incentives. Ho is a member of the National Assessment Governing Board that sets policy for the National Assessment of Educational Progress. He holds his Ph.D. in Educational Psychology and his M.S. in Statistics from Stanford University. Before graduate school, he taught middle school creative writing in his hometown of Honolulu, Hawaii, and high school physics and AP physics in Ojai, California.
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Benjamin R. Shear
Assistant Professor, University of Colorado Boulder
Benjamin Shear is an assistant professor in the Research and Evaluation Methodology program at the University of Colorado Boulder, College of Education. His primary research interests address topics in psychometrics and applied statistics, including validity theory, differential item functioning, and the application of diagnostic classification models. His work aims to inform our perspectives about test score meaning and use for research and accountability purposes, and to help answer questions such as, “what do test scores measure, and how do we know?” As a former high school mathematics teacher, his work often focuses on applications in mathematics education. His research in applied statistics seeks to improve the use of quantitative methods by education researchers measuring student learning, evaluating education policies, or studying inequality. This work is often carried out collaboratively with researchers working in other areas and through his teaching.
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Research Collaborators
Ericka Weathers
Assistant Professor, Pennsylvania State University
Ericka S. Weathers is an Assistant Professor of Education at the Penn State College of Education. Dr. Weathers uses quasi-experimental methodologies to examine the impact of structural inequality on educational opportunities and outcomes in topic areas such as school finance, school discipline, academic achievement, and special education. Her current work explores school segregation as well as federal, state, and local education policies as possible determinants of racial disparities in school district revenue and expenditures.
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Ann Owens
Professor Sociology and Spatial Sciences, University of Southern California
Ann Owens is Professor of Sociology and, by courtesy, Public Policy and Spatial Sciences at the University of Southern California. Her research centers on the causes and consequences of social inequality, with a focus on urban neighborhoods, housing, education, and geographic and social mobility. Ann has particular expertise on neighborhood and school segregation, and her research also examines how housing and educational policies cause or alleviate social inequalities. Ann is a recipient of the William T. Grant Foundation Scholar award, Spencer Foundation/National Academy of Education Postdoctoral Fellowship, and the 2022 William Julius Wilson Early Career Award from the American Sociological Association. With sean f. reardon, Ann co-leads the Segregation Index, a project aimed at generating comprehensive residential and school segregation data (www.segindex.org). Ann received her PhD in Sociology and Social Policy from Harvard University and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality.
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Elizabeth Stuart
Professor of American Health in the Department of Biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Elizabeth A. Stuart, Ph.D. is the Frank Hurley and Catharine Dorrier Chair and Bloomberg Professor of American Health in the Department of Biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, with joint appointments in the Department of Mental Health and the Department of Health Policy and Management. A statistician by training, her research interests are in design and analysis approaches for estimating causal effects in experimental and non-experimental studies, including questions around the external validity of randomized trials and the internal validity of non-experimental studies. Her recent interests include combining data sources to assess treatment effect heterogeneity and methods for evidence synthesis. She has extensive experience with the application of causal inference methods in education, the social sciences, and public health, particularly mental health, substance use, and state policy evaluation.
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Tom Kane
Professor of Education and Economics
Thomas Kane is an economist and Walter H. Gale Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research, a university-wide research center that works with school districts and state agencies. Between 2009 and 2012, he directed the Measures of Effective Teaching project for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. His work has spanned both K-12 and higher education, covering topics such as the design of school accountability systems, teacher recruitment and retention, financial aid for college, race-conscious college admissions and the earnings impacts of community colleges. From 1995 to 1996, Kane served as the senior economist for labor, education, and welfare policy issues within President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers. From 1991 through 2000, he was a faculty member at the Kennedy School of Government. Kane has also been a professor of public policy at UCLA and has held visiting fellowships at the Brookings Institution and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
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PhD Students and Post Docs
Sadie Richardson
PhD Student
Sadie Richardson is a doctoral student in Educational Policy at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Sadie received a B.A. in Cognitive Sciences and Statistics from Rice University. Prior to Stanford, she worked on the early childhood team at Texas Policy Lab in Houston, TX. Her research interests include policy-relevant child development and education research, and early childhood education programs and policies that promote equitable outcomes for children.
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Michelle Spiegel
Postdoc
Michelle Spiegel is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Educational Opportunity Project. Her research broadly focuses on inequalities in K-12 education, and how policy can improve educational opportunities for low-income students. She relies on descriptive and quasi-experimental methods for her research. In addition to studying educational inequalities, she is interested in the history and sociology of education policy knowledge. She received her PhD in Education from the University of California, Irvine, a Master’s in Public Administration from New York University, and B.A. from the University of Michigan.
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Research & Development Staff and Contributors
Rachel Reis
Operations Manager
Rachel Reis is the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford’s Operations Manager. She oversees day-to-day operations, provides administrative support, and helps manage the EOP’s research projects. Rachel has worked in both public and private sectors focusing on improving team efficiency and driving organizational growth. Rachel is a first-generation college graduate who is dedicated to educational equity, and volunteers as a College Coach with ScholarMatch, a nonprofit organization supporting first-generation college students with individualized advising and career mentoring. Rachel received a Master of Public Affairs from the University of San Francisco, and a B.A. in Sociology, with a minor in Diversity studies, from the University of Washington.
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Jim Saliba
Research Data Analyst
Jim Saliba is the research data analyst for the Educational Opportunity Project. Jim received a bachelor’s degree in drama from Stanford University and a master’s degree in sociology from the University of Minnesota, where they are currently finishing their dissertation. Jim’s work sits at the intersection of education, politics, and structural racism. They have a passion for data, methods (including ethnography, quantitative, and sociolinguistic), and epistemology, and above all working in community to combat oppression. Beyond research, Jim has engaged in poetry and performance as well as the arts as means for community ritual and healing.
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Jiyeon Shim
Research Data Analyst
Jiyeon Shim is a research data analyst at the Educational Opportunity Project. Jiyeon currently works on the NYSED project, in which the EOP and The New York State Education Department (NYSED) are partnering to study progress toward educational equity in New York State. Jiyeon’s key responsibility on the team is to perform statistical analyses of datasets to uncover patterns and trends related to educational equity under the guidance of senior staff. Jiyeon received a B.A. in Business Administration with a minor in Computer Science from Yong In University in South Korea, and a Master’s degree in Economics from San Diego State University.
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Jie Min
EOP Research Scholar
Jie Min is a research scholar for the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University. Her research aims to understand the mechanisms causing educational inequality and to seek strategies to alleviate academic achievement gaps. Before joining Stanford, she worked as a research statistician at Far Harbor, LLC, where she applied a wide range of statistical techniques to education and public health research. Prior to that, she was a research assistant with the Houston Education Research Consortium for five years, investigating crucial questions grounded in the needs of education practitioners. Her methodological specialties include survey methodology (power analysis, missing data analysis, and modeling of survey errors), linkage across different data types (survey, administrative, and big data), multilevel and longitudinal analysis, quasi-experimental methods, and spatial analysis. Jie was a recipient of the National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship. Jie earned her PhD and MA in sociology, as well as an MS in statistics, from Rice University.
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Demetra Kalogrides
PhD, Research Associate
Demetra Kalogrides is a research associate at the Center for Education Policy Analysis where she collaborates on research with professor Sean Reardon. Currently, she works on the creation and analysis of the data in the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA - seda.stanford.edu). SEDA is a publicly available series of data files that include test performance and other demographic and economic information about every public school district in the US. She is also a part-time research associate at the Annenberg Institute at Brown University where she studies teachers and school leadership with Professor Susanna Loeb. Kalogrides received a bachelor's degree in sociology from Santa Clara University and a Masters and PhD in sociology from the University of California at Davis. She has worked at CEPA since 2008.
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Former Project Team Members
Thalia Ramirez
Operations Manager
Thalia Ramirez is the Educational Opportunity Project (EOP)'s Operations Manager. She oversees day-to-day operations, provides administrative support, and helps manage the EOP’s projects. In her previous role, Thalia worked within the areas of communications, fundraising, and event planning as a Nonprofit Management Fellow at the Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA) at Harvard University. She is passionate about promoting educational equity and racial justice, and has a background in directing afterschool and summer programming for K-12th grade students in Boston, MA. Thalia received her BA in Neuroscience, with a minor in Teaching and Learning Studies, from Wellesley College.
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Julia Paris
Research Contributor
Julia Paris is a Research Assistant at the Brookings Institution. She contributes to the EOP’s data projects, including the Education Recovery Scorecard Project. She holds an M.A. in Public Policy and a B.A. in Economics from Stanford University.
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Elise Dizon-Ross
Researcher
Elise Dizon-Ross is a doctoral student in Economics of Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. She received a B.A. and a M.A. in Economics from Stanford University and an M.P.P. from the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies, Elise worked with multiple nonprofit and public sector organizations to increase educational and employment opportunities for disadvantaged communities. Her research examines how economic inequality and educational and social policies impact educational outcomes for low-income and minority populations, with a particular focus on the intersection of education and local economic issues such as housing, affordability, and homelessness.
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Rebecca Hinze-Pifer
Assistant Professor, University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign
Rebecca Heinz-Pifer is an Assistant Professor at the Illinois College of Education. Dr Hinze-Pifer's research focuses on school-based approaches to reducing social inequality, with particular focus on programs and practices influencing adolescent socioemotional development. Her work includes a mixture of randomized field experiments of school-based programs and quasi-experimental studies of using school administrative data to understand the impacts of school policies. Dr. Hinze-Pifer has published and presented on a range of related topics, including school discipline, teacher classroom management practices, and student responses to community violence.
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Heewon Jang
Assistant Professor, University of Alabama
Heewon Jang was a doctoral student in educational policy at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. She is a recipient of the fellowship from the Karr Family Scholarship and the Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies. Prior to her doctoral training, she received a bachelor’s degree in Education and Statistics (2013) and a master’s in the Sociology of Education (2016) from Korea University. Her research focuses on the patterns and consequences of residential and school segregation in relation to racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps. She is also interested in how policy interventions can increase educational opportunities for the disadvantaged. She uses a variety of quantitative methods to study how school and neighborhood contexts affect academic performance of students from different racial and economic backgrounds and whether the impact of these contexts can be moderated by educational policy.
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Kenneth Shores
Assistant Professor, Pennsylvania State University
Kenneth Shores is an Assistant Professor at Pennsylvania State University studying education inequality and policy tools for its remediation. Relying on quantitative methodologies, his research includes both description and prevention/intervention. On the descriptive side, he’s primarily interested in using large datasets to document racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in student learning and educational policy (e.g., school disciplinary policy). Kenneth has additional work using conjoint survey designs to describe individual understanding of and preferences for social inequality. On the prevention/intervention side, he uses quasi-experimental methods to identify the effects of environmental contexts on student outcomes as well as policies that are effective at remediating outcome inequality.
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Jessica Drescher
PhD Student
Jessica Drescher is a doctoral student in education policy at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, and is a recipient of the IES Fellowship and the Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education (EDGE) Fellowship. Jessica received her M.Ed. in education policy and management at Harvard University and her B.A. in sociology at Colby College. Prior to Stanford, she spent several years working with Paul Reville at Harvard’s Education Redesign Lab, where she focused on the role of city government in addressing the iron-law correlation between socioeconomic status and education outcomes. Shaped by her experiences as an unaccompanied homeless youth and first-generation college student, Jessica is interested in education as a lever of social mobility and exploring the potential of big data to inform social policy.
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Kaylee Tuggle Matheny
PhD Student
Kaylee Tuggle Matheny is a doctoral student in Education Policy and Sociology of Education and is a recipient of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) predoctoral training fellowship. Prior to coming to Stanford, Kaylee earned a BA in sociology and creative writing from Emory University. She went on to teach World Literature at a Georgia public high school. She is interested in utilizing mixed methods to understand how socioeconomic status mediates educational opportunity and how education impacts social mobility.
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Jenny Buontempo
Research Data Analyst
Jenny Buontempo was a SEDA Research Data Analyst at the Center for Education Policy Analysis. She supported Professor Sean Reardon and helped manage the assembly and expansion of SEDA. In the US, Jenny received her bachelor’s degree in mathematics and international business from Saint Peter’s University, a master’s degree in mathematics from the University of Kansas, and a master’s degree in interdisciplinary education with a STEEM (Science, Technology, Environmental Education, and Mathematics) emphasis from Santa Clara University. Jenny received her P.h.D in STEM Education from the University of Texas at Austin.
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Belen Chavez
Research Data Analyst
Belen Chavez was a SEDA Research Data Analyst and managed the data for Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA). Belen is an applied data analyst and has previous data experience in e-commerce, utilities, and litigation consulting. Belen received her bachelor's degree in business economics from University of California, Irvine and received her master's degree in economics from Duke University.
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Richard DiSalvo
Research Data Analyst
Richard worked as the SEDA Research Data Analyst for SEDA version 2.0, and supported the release of SEDA version 2.1. He is an applied economist conducting research in education, environment, and public health policy.
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Hiep Ho
Web Developer
Hiep is the Webmaster for Center for Education Policy and Analysis (CEPA). He's responsible for the implementation, development and maintenance of CEPA websites and servers. He also advises and provides support to CEPA faculty and staff on Information Technology. Prior to coming to CEPA, Hiep was the Computer Information Systems Analyst and the main contributor of database design and implementation, network administration, web design and implementation, and desktop support to faculty and staff of Stanford Neurosurgery, Neurology and Institute for Neuro-Innovation & Translational Neurosciences of School of Medicine.
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Ralph Rogers
During a 20-year marketing and communications career in Silicon Valley, Ralph led teams at large companies such as Apple Computer, and was also VP of Marketing in two tech startups. In 2002, he transitioned to the nonprofit sector to help organizations creating positive change in the world. Since that transition, he led the marketing team launching the new Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, led communications at the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education, the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and served as a board member of the San Francisco Zen Center.
- MBA, Stanford Graduate School of Business
- BS, United States Military Academy
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Marissa Thompson
Assistant Professor of Sociology at Columbia University
Marissa Thompson was a doctoral student in Sociology at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, as well as a predoctoral IES fellow and recipient of the Stanford Graduate Fellowship (SGF) in Science and Engineering. She earned a Ph.D. in Sociology of Education and Education Policy in 2021. Her current research focuses on the causes and consequences of racial and socioeconomic inequality, with an emphasis on understanding the role of education in producing disparate outcomes over the life-course. She employs both descriptive and quasi-experimental methods using secondary data (such as longitudinal studies and large administrative databases) as well as novel primary data (such as nationally-representative survey experiments). Marissa holds an M.A. in Sociology (2019) from Stanford, and a B.S.E. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (2016) from the University of Pennsylvania.
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Sam Trejo
Assistant Professor of Sociology at Princeton University
Sam Trejo was a doctoral student in Sociology & Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. His research explores how social, environmental, and genetic factors combine to shape human development and the implications for public policy. Sam specializes in quasi-experimental and biosocial methods, and a driving theme of his work is the reciprocal relationship between education and health. While at Stanford, Sam was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and an Institute for Education Sciences Graduate Research Fellow. He also served as the student representative for the Graduate School of Education’s division on Social Sciences, Humanities, and Interdisciplinary Policy.
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Joseph Van Matre
Institutional Research and Academic Planning
Joseph Van Matre is an educational researcher who worked for SEDA from 2016-2017 as a research data analyst on data included in SEDA versions 1.1 and 2.0. His work centers on understanding and improving educational achievement, especially among students from economic, racial, and gender/sexual minority groups that have been historically underserved. He holds a BA and a BS from the University of Arkansas and an MA in Economics from Vanderbilt University.
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Carrie Townley Flores
PhD Student
Carrie is a doctoral student in the Race, Inequality, Language, and Education program at Stanford University. She holds a B.A. in Education and English from University of Michigan. She is an Institute of Education Sciences (IES) fellow and a recipient of the Stanford Graduate Fellowship in Science and Engineering. Before coming to Stanford, Carrie taught in urban and suburban schools in the U.S. as well as an international school in Finland. Her research interests include education inequality in U.S. K-12 schools.
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Anne Podolsky
PhD Student
Anne is a doctoral student in Education Policy at Stanford University. Her mixed methods research focuses on improving educational opportunities and outcomes, especially for students from underserved communities. An education lawyer and teacher by training, Podolsky has served in legal, research, and policy roles with a variety of organizations. She has worked with the Learning Policy Institute, John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities, the New York State Education Department, the Children’s Advocacy Institute, and Palantir Technologies. Anne holds a J.D. from the University of San Diego School of Law, an M.A. in Education Policy from Stanford University and a B.S. in Elementary Education from Loyola University Chicago (summa cum laude). Podolsky is an Illinois State Board of Education certified teacher and a member of the State Bar of California.
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“The American Dream will remain out of reach until all of our children have equal educational opportunities. My hope is that this data will help in the hard work of bringing the dream closer to reality.”
Sean Reardon
Funders
This website and SEDA's research are generously supported by the following funders:
The construction of SEDA has been supported by grants from the Institute of Education Sciences (R305D110018), the Spencer Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Overdeck Family Foundation, and by a visiting scholar fellowship from the Russell Sage Foundation. Some of the data used in constructing the SEDA files were provided by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).
The findings and opinions expressed in the research reported here are those of the authors and do not represent views of NCES, the Institute of Education Sciences, the Spencer Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Overdeck Family Foundation, or the U.S. Department of Education.