APA is a nationally recognized nonpartisan leader in education issues for over 40 years. APA has worked across the country on education issues – including school finance, educator effectiveness, early childhood education, cost modeling, and program evaluation – and has proven impact. Multiple states use school funding systems based upon APA work, and school districts use teacher compensation systems or budgeting approaches developed by APA. Numerous education program operators, state agencies, and school districts have used the results of our program evaluations to improve their operations and demonstrate their successes, and to secure additional funding support to expand their operations. 

APA has completed hundreds of projects across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Over more than four decades our work has carried us across all 50 states. We have conducted hundreds of successful projects and developed expertise in many areas including school finance, educator effectiveness, early childhood education, education program cost modeling, and program evaluation. This experience gives our staff the distinct advantage of having viewed the challenges facing our nation’s schools from multiple perspectives. Understanding these different perspectives is critical to implementing sustainable and effective policy change. 

APA believes in close collaboration with policymakers and stakeholders at national, state, and local levels. As a client-focused small business, APA seeks to develop close working relationships with each of our clients to become thought partners and to ensure that the work we complete is meaningful. We help our clients clearly understand the fiscal, legal, and policy implications of implementing education programs and reforms, including short-, medium-, and long-term impacts. We believe in research being actionable, understandable and accessible to all audiences. APA staff are committed to helping clients objectively solve problems so they can meet student performance goals and improve the quality, effectiveness, and efficiency of our nation's public schools.

APA has expertise in quantitative and qualitative research methods. APA has expertise in a wide range of research approaches that we leverage in conducting our work, including fiscal and data analysis, cost modeling, statistical modeling, surveys, interviews, focus groups, facilitation, and literature reviews. A particular strength of our firm is that we are nonpartisan and focus on using data to find specific answers to the problems our clients ask of us.