The Feasibility of Developing a California Education Longitudinal Study

This paper explores the feasibility of collecting longitudinal survey data on students within California schools as a way of supplementing the information California currently collects on its students. Hopefully, this paper will be the start of a process that will lead to the institution of what we in this paper tentatively call the California Education Longitudinal Study (CELS). After demonstrating the feasibility of a CELS during a briefing with policymakers in Sacramento on April 27, 2001 (see Appendix B), my presumption is that California will either contract with other outside consultants familiar with data collection operations or use current state government staff to develop a full written design of CELS. This design should lead, in turn, to either an in- house data collection or a data collection by a survey research firm familiar with large-scale longitudinal surveys