In 2013, the state of Texas passed House Bill 5 (HB 5) which established high school course pathways tailored to student interests by labor market area via the Foundation High School Program (FHSP). The pathway options for students include STEM, Arts and Humanities, Business and Industry, Public Service, and Multidisciplinary. While the intent of…

Background, Purpose, & Research Questions: High school exit exams are meant to standardize quality and ensure that students graduate with basic knowledge and skills. However, policies that expand exit exams are associated with increased dropout rates, particularly among non-white students (e.g. Papay, Murnane, and Willet, 2010; Reardon and…

In March 2019, the Ontario government announced that commencing in 2023-24, secondary school students (Grades 9-12) would be required to gain four of 30 graduation credits through online courses. At the time of the policy pronouncement, these four credits (or courses) would become the first mandatory online courses in Canadian K-12 education. The…

Universal Free Application for Financial Student Aid (FAFSA) policies are being implemented in states as a way to eliminate financial barriers to college enrollment and completion for underrepresented student groups. High school counselors play a critical role in helping students complete this graduation requirement. Texas adopted a universal…

Purpose: While most language departments of the university offer service-learning (SL) subjects based on language teaching, such as "Teaching Chinese as a Second Language in Local Schools" and "Serving the Community through Teaching English," this paper aims to argue that teaching students to teach language(s) is yet to be the…

This publication outlines the Digital Equity Framework--a set of principles, guidelines, and policy recommendations designed to bridge the digital divides at the state level, for K-12 systems, and for higher education. It introduces three frameworks for digital equity, designed to lay the groundwork for learners to fully participate in society…

Across Massachusetts, legislators, policymakers, educators, families, and communities are engaged in important conversations about whether to continue using student performance on the MCAS tests as part of the state's high-school graduation requirements. This document presents lessons drawn from 15-plus years of research on educational opportunity…

Computer science education has seen a large national push to be included in the K-12 curriculum (Fluck, Webb, Cox, Angeli, Malyn-Smith, Voogt, & Zagami, 2016; Theresa Avancena & Nishihara, 2014; Veletsianos, Beth, Lin, & Russell, 2016; Yadav, Gretter, Hambrusch, & Sands, 2016). Students are leaving schools and entering an economy…

This report identifies the statutory requirements, including programs, reports, evaluations, and accountability measures, impacted by the assessment waiver and describes how each statutory requirement is impacted by the assessment waiver. It discusses the data which the State Board has not collected or will not collect because of the assessment…

The purpose of this study was to analyze and determine the predictive power of individual and a combination of different indicators that are used to determine college readiness. For this study a logistic regression analysis was conducted due to the dichotomous nature of the dependent variable. The dependent variable for the study was the earning…

Years ago, we learned of a higher education institution with a wonderful reputation for excellence that had incredible silos and disparate processes that were not student friendly. These processes included requiring students to reapply and have their transfer credit reevaluated if they wanted to change majors that were in different colleges at the…

As a number of states have created Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM)-focused options for students, and more states will make them available in the future, several important policy considerations merit analysis. These include the ways states have designed their STEM graduation options, with a focus on comparing the…

Miami-Dade County Public Schools had 23,062 graduates in the 2018-2019 academic year. Most students, 90%, achieved a standard diploma (24 credits). Some students chose an alternative curriculum where 506 (2%) achieved an Advanced International Certificate of Education (AICE) diploma and 368 (2%) achieved an International Baccalaureate (IB). An…

The physical education teacher education (PETE) landscape is in need of adjusting the types of credit hours allocated within its programs. In doing so, preservice physical education teachers will be better equipped to take on the challenges of today's physical education milieu. PETE program credit hours have remained similar over the past 3…

Despite the unprecedented challenges Ohio's education community faced at the end of the 2019-2020 school year, Ohio remains committed to using evidence, data and feedback from the Ohio School Report Cards to guide our continuous improvement journey toward excellence in education. This year, the Ohio School Report Cards will not feature overall…