The No Child Left Behind Act requires states to publish high school graduation rates for public schools; the U.S. Department of Education is currently considering a mandate to standardize high school graduation rate reporting. However, no consensus exists among researchers or policymakers about how to measure high school graduation rates. We use…

Under No Child Left Behind legislation, schools are held accountable for making "adequate yearly progress." Presumably, a school progresses when its impact on students improves. Yet questions about impact are causal questions that are rarely framed explicitly in discussions of accountability. One causal question about school impact is of…