Today, the pressure is on to enhance student success in higher education. Demands for accountability and mounting concerns about access are prompting educators to re-think traditional approaches to retention management and to look for new strategies. At the same time, higher education is seeing unprecedented changes in its students, including a…

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…

Community colleges across the country have created innovative, data-informed programs that are models for educating underprepared students, engaging traditionally underserved students, and helping students from all backgrounds succeed. However, because most of these programs have limited scope, the field now has pockets of success rather than…

The Oregon Statewide Report Card is an annual publication required by law (ORS 329.115), which reports on the state of public schools and their progress towards the goals of the Oregon Educational Act for the 21st Century. The purpose of the Oregon Report Card is to monitor trends among school districts and Oregon's progress toward achieving the…

School completion rates for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students are well below the rates for non-Indigenous students. The target of halving the gap by 2020 in Year 12 (or equivalent) attainment rates between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students is a major national challenge. This paper discusses the causes of low completion rates for…

We evaluate multiple variants of a commonly used intervention to boost education in developing countries--the conditional cash transfer (CCT)--with a student level randomization that allows us to generate intra-family and peer-network variation. We test three treatments: a basic CCT treatment based on school attendance, a savings treatment that…

This report paints a collective portrait of the Baltimore City Schools dropouts of 2008-09 to summarize some of the commonalities that join their individual stories together. After examining the surface level demographic characteristics of these dropouts, researchers probed more deeply into their behavioral characteristics in the years preceding…

This study addressed the problem of poor attendance adversely affecting grades and learning. Current school policies do not address problematic attendance for all school-aged children, perpetuating trends of academic failure. The research objective was to determine if unexcused absences had a greater negative impact on a high-stakes test compared…

This "Report Card to the Public" is published in accordance with Alaska Statute 14.03.120 for the school year 2011-2012. Under state law, each school district is required to report information about its plans and performance to its community. This report includes a statewide summary of performance results. It reports the status of public…

The 1997 Nebraska Legislature enacted Bill 806 to promote school consolidation, which legislators believed would lead schools to become more cost-efficient and provide a significantly larger curriculum. This legislative action begged the question: Has the move to consolidate schools made Nebraska schools more efficient while providing greater…

This "Report Card to the Public" is published in accordance with Alaska Statute 14.03.120 for the school year 2012-2013. Under state law, each school district is required to report information about its plans and performance to its community. This report includes a statewide summary of performance results. Public knowledge of the school…

Researchers target 9th grade as the make or break year for completing high school. During the 9th-grade year, many students for the first time have to earn passing grades in core courses, and these core courses are typically some of the toughest and most rigorous academic classes a student must take in high school. Furthermore, the rising use of…

This paper presents the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs' Bureau-Wide Annual Report Card for 2008-2009. This report, covering 186 schools provides data tables on: (1) Enrollment; (2) Average Daily Attendance Rate, Graduation Rate and Dropout Rate; (3) Student Achievement; and (4) High Quality Teachers.

Dropping out of school--and the concomitant failure to graduate with a high school diploma--form a "silent epidemic" in the United States today. "Nationally, research puts the graduation rate between 68 and 71 percent, which means that almost one-third of all public high school students in America fail to graduate" or drop out…

Racial identity attitudes, a construct proposed as a measure of the world view of Blacks (Cross & Vandiver, 2001), and academic performance of a group of Black females attending a high-poverty, failing high school with a 42% graduation rate were examined. These young women were either pregnant or parenting and attended a parenting support group at…