The Student Privacy Policy Office (SPPO) at the U.S. Department of Education (Department) performed a four-year review of a nationally representative sample of the websites of 1,504 local education agencies (LEAs) to identify whether and how these websites include information about student privacy. In each year of the study, SPPO reviewed a…

Colleges have increasingly turned to predictive analytics to target at-risk students for additional support. Most of the predictive analytic applications in higher education are proprietary, with private companies offering little transparency about their underlying models. We address this lack of transparency by systematically comparing two…

Short-cycle higher education programs (SCPs), lasting two or three years, capture about a quarter of higher education enrollment in the world and can play a key role enhancing workforce skills. In this paper, we estimate the program-level contribution of SCPs to student academic and labor market outcomes, and study how and why these contributions…

This annual report provides information for the 2021-22 school year on grade-level retention and student performance in the Texas public school system. Student retention and promotion data are reported with data on the performance of students in Grades 3-8 on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) reading and mathematics…

In this paper we analyze the extent to which a mandated kindergarten assessment predicts 3rd grade outcomes, and the academic progression for students from 3rd grade to high school. We find that the kindergarten assessment strongly predicts 3rd grade outcomes, with the math skills assessment being especially predictive of 3rd grade academic…

The Extended Project Qualification (EPQ) is available for students in Key Stage 5 (KS5), to be taken alongside other qualifications, such as A levels. It differs from most other academic qualifications at KS5 because it is not examined, but instead involves students undertaking an in-depth project in an area of their choosing. Students are…

These technical appendices are for the report, "English as a Second Language at California's Community Colleges: An Early Examination of AB 705 Reforms." Assembly Bill 705 (AB 705 Irwin) sought to increase successful completion of transfer-level math and English courses by addressing systemic problems in traditional placement policies…