Reported here are the results of analyses to describe the patterns of identification and academic and developmental outcomes for children with disabilities, conducted as part of the 2004 National Assessment of the implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This report provides background context for National…

Despite the proliferation of data about student performance, secondary school educators have had difficulty accessing data on their former students' post-high school employment and earnings in the formal economy. This article describes how one community used state unemployment insurance data, merged with student record data, to investigate the…

If non-completion rate is to be a useful performance indicator it must reflect the recent health of a course in a transparent and robust manner that enables comparisons to be made between groups of students and between courses of varied structures. For flexible degree programmes with varied attendance modes and multiple entry points, traditional…

The authors performed path analysis, followed by a bootstrap procedure, to test the predictions of a model explaining the relationships among students' distal future goals (both extrinsic and intrinsic), their adoption of a middle-range subgoal, their perceptions of task instrumentality, and their proximal task-oriented self-regulation strategies.…

High school students with disabilities who drop out are costly to society. Compared to those who graduate, they are more likely to be unemployed, dependent on public services, and involved in the criminal justice system. Consequently, helping students with disabilities graduate has become a prominent national concern. Students with disabilities…

"Straight A's: Public Education Policy and Progress" is a biweekly newsletter that focuses on education news and events both in Washington, DC and around the country. The following articles are included in this issue: (1) New Report Offers Recommendations for Defining and Improving Graduation Rates: Calls for New Federal Funding Stream…

With higher expectations for graduation, what are ways to keep students in school and graduate? To have a 100% graduation rate with students who are prepared for higher education or the work place is certainly a major goal of high schools. This has been strongly reinforced by schools needing to meet Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) as mandated by No…

The district conducts a cross-sectional analysis of student dropouts annually; it examines dropout rates among students enrolled in various grades at one point in time. A longitudinal analysis, also conducted annually, tracks a group of students in the same grade or cohort over a period of several years. Each method addresses a different aspect of…

Today's welfare system does not encourage postsecondary education, focusing instead on immediate employment. The loss of postsecondary education as a route out of poverty may be detrimental to some women. College graduation is associated with lower rates of recidivism and post-welfare poverty than attendance without graduation or no attendance.…

"Straight A's: Public Education Policy and Progress" is a biweekly newsletter that focuses on education news and events both in Washington, DC and around the country. The following articles are included in this issue: (1) U.S. Department of Education Holds High School Summit: Diploma Should Be a "Road Map to a Prosperous, Purposeful…

This article reviews recent literature highlighting the challenges associated with the college-to-work transition and proposes a model for understanding the experience of workplace entry for new graduates. This model outlines three stages of development in the transition process, namely (a) anticipation, (b) adjustment, and (c) achievement, and…

Educational research has shown that individual-level background characteristics, such as parental socio-economic status and academic ability, influence college going behavior. This study tests for the existence of aggregate-level high school effects on college enrollment, persistence and degree attainment. It links institutional data on students…

This study investigated the upper age educational mandates of 15 states and the policies regarding alternative awards to the regular diploma in 19 states. The study was based on analysis of state policy documents, a 1990 state survey of exiting procedures, and telephone conversations with state education agency officials. The first section…

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001 requires that public elementary and secondary school systems be held accountable for achieving high levels of educational proficiency for all students. While achievement testing is the central component of state accountability systems under NCLB, these systems must include graduation rates as an academic…

One of the most important indicators of educational performance is the high school dropout rate. Reducing dropout rates and improving high school graduation rates are important goals for both educators and policymakers. Yet there is a great deal of controversy about how best to measure dropout and graduation rates. This issue of EL Facts provides…