This completely updated edition of "The Almanac of American Education" helps users understand and compare the quality of education at the national, state, and county levels. Compiled from official U.S. government sources, this book contains historical and current data, insightful analysis, and useful graphs that provide compelling…

The College Ambition Program (CAP) is designed to encourage low-income and minority students to enroll in college. The following analysis presents updated results from my AERA presidential talk in 2014. Results indicate that CAP, which is a schoolwide intervention, increased college attendance for low-income and minority students in seven…

Graduation requirements and diploma options for students with disabilities who participate in the general assessment has been a topic of interest for many years. The recent push for all students, including those with disabilities, to leave school ready for college and career has heightened the importance of understanding what states are requiring…

Oregon continues to make gains in its on-time high school graduation rate. The rate increased to 74% for the 2014-15 school year--up from 72% the year before. The graduation rate for almost all student groups rose, led by Hispanic students (2.4 percentage points) and Black students (2.4 percentage points). The rate for economically disadvantaged…

The nation has achieved an 82.3 percent high school graduation rate--a record high. Graduation rates rose for all student subgroups, and the number of low-graduation-rate high schools and students enrolled in them dropped again, indicating that progress has had far-reaching benefits for all students. This report is the first to analyze 2014…

States cannot make good policy and practice decisions--and ultimately cannot improve student performance--if they do not have basic information about how students are performing along the way. As such, Achieve focused on states' publicly reported student performance against college- and career-ready (CCR) indicators in all 50 states and the…

In 2012, more than 13 percent of undergraduates attended for-profit postsecondary institutions, up from 9 percent in 2009. The rapid growth of the for-profit sector has renewed public scrutiny and concern about the historically poor labor market outcomes of students at many of these institutions and the amount of debt students in these…

Over the period 2010-14 more than 80 percent of public high school graduates in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands were placed in non-credit-bearing developmental English courses and more than 92 percent were placed in developmental math courses when they enrolled at Northern Marianas College, the commonwealth's only public…

This memorandum describes the Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) exams participation and performance of 2013 to 2015 public school graduates in Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) and the state of Maryland. The results are disaggregated by demographics and high schools. Students in the MCPS Class of 2015 continued to…

This report analyzes data for secondary special education students in Washington who left high school during the 2013-14 school year. These data were collected by the state starting on June 1, 2015, from all 233 districts with high schools: 230 districts, two state schools, and one educational service agency (a collection of 27 small districts…

"The Condition of College and Career Readiness" looks at the progress of the 2016 ACT®-tested graduating class relative to college and career readiness. This state briefing begins with statistics in the following categories for Arizona: performance, STEM, career readiness, impact, behaviors that impact access and opportunity, pipeline,…

The role of the on-going social father in America has received increased attention in the last quarter century. In some quarters, the U.S. father has been viewed as supernumerary or optional. In other quarters, the U.S. father has been perceived to be essential to the optimum development of his children. Still other factions have been intermediate…

The Census Bureau has historically grouped high school diploma holders along with those who hold "high school equivalent" credentials. Among these is the credential earned through successfully passing the General Education Development (GED) test. Interest in identifying those with GEDs has recently increased, in part from debate within…

Sparked by the current economic situation in the U.S., policymakers have begun to shift their concern from solely concentrating on the preparation of students for college to preparing them for the workforce as well. Thus, it is time for CTE to understand its impact on students' long-term trajectories. The purpose of this study was to predict…

Dropping out of high school is related to a number of negative outcomes. For example, the median income of persons ages 18 through 67 who had not completed high school was roughly $26,000 in 2013. By comparison, the median income of persons ages 18 through 67 who completed their education with at least a high school credential (i.e., a regular…