Understanding the early teacher pipeline, how many and what types of individuals are pursuing a teaching credential, is critically important. Unfortunately, as Dan Goldhaber and Kris Holden explain, the two national data collections that can be used to explore these areas provide incomplete and sometimes contrasting pictures about the number of…

In recent years the fight for equity in higher education has intensified. Institutional leaders, advocates, and policymakers alike are seeking scalable solutions that rapidly close equity gaps among this nation's most underserved populations. Too many hardworking students still struggle to afford a college education, and historically underserved…

This article describes original research to determine reasons graduate students do not complete requirements for a Master's (M.Ed.) in Middle Level Education degree at the Southeastern University. Since the program's initial cohort the graduation rate has decreased. Program faculty was concerned about the increasing difference between the number…

This paper reports on progress to date with a project underway in New Zealand involving the extraction of data from multiple government agencies that is then combined into one comprehensive longitudinal integrated dataset and made available to trial participants in a way never previously thought possible. The dataset includes school leaver…

An early warning system is an intentional process whereby school personnel collectively analyze student data to monitor students at risk of falling off track for graduation and to provide the interventions and resources to intervene. We studied the process of monitoring the early warning indicators and implementing interventions to ascertain…

This report describes a follow-up qualitative study, conducted in 2006 by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, of a small group of New York City high schools that were "beating the odds" in preparing low-performing 9th-grade students for timely high school graduation and college going. The 13 schools included two long-established…

As more community colleges focus on using data to improve educational outcomes, many administrators are considering business intelligence applications that promise a path toward more informed decisions. Getting there, leaders say, requires more than installing some out-of-the-box solution; it requires changing the culture and finding skilled…

Studies of student risk of school dropout have shown that present predictors of at-risk status do not accurately identify a large percentage of students who eventually drop out. Through the analysis of the entire Grade 1-12 longitudinal cohort-based grading histories of the class of 2006 for two school districts in the United States, the author…

This article reports on the central recommendation of the federal task force for a way to better handle dropout and graduation rates. Made up of 10 academics and government statisticians, the panel comprising the Task Force on Graduation, Completion, and Dropout Indicators was formed in the fall of 2003 to advise the U.S. Department of Education's…

This article shows how the methods of survival analysis (also known as event history analysis) lend themselves to the study of the timing of educational events. Using examples from teacher attrition and student dropout research, survival methods are introduced for building statistical models of the risk of event occurrence over time. (Author/SLD)

Recent studies have argued that there is a dropout crisis in the U.S. But the authors in this article, find that this contention is based on flawed analyses of inadequate data. Using a much wider range of sources, they conclude that the situation is not nearly so dire as is commonly believed. (Contains 14 endnotes.)