To address the important issue of dropouts from their schools, the Council of Great City Schools undertook a major research effort to make sense of the disparate ways in which cities keep their dropout data, and to advise various policy makers on the development of common metrics for measuring the problem. A survey of Council member schools…

In statistical terms, transfer rates require two components: a numerator that represents community college students who transfer and a denominator that approximates the pool of potential transfer students. The California Task Force adopted a set of criteria to judge the appropriateness of prospective pairs of numerators and denominators. Its form…