The Texas Education Agency (TEA) prepares an annual report on graduates and dropouts in Texas public secondary schools. This report includes state summaries of the annual dropout rate, longitudinal graduation and dropout rates, and state attrition rates. In addition to statewide statistics, the report provides historical information about dropout…

Diploma and degree completion have become the fundamental standard for judging the performance of secondary and postsecondary educational institutions. Increasingly, leaders of education and workforce policy and programs assume that these measures of attainment effectively serve as indicators of adequate levels of essential literacy and numeracy…

In 2016, analysts at Marzano Research identified a focused set of content for each K-12 grade level in English language arts (ELA), mathematics, and science called The Critical Concepts (Simms, 2016). Using a set of source standards that included the Common Core State Standards (CCSS; National Governors Association for Best Practices & Council…

In 2005, all 50 state governors made an unprecedented commitment to voluntarily implement a common, more reliable formula for calculating their states' high school graduation rates by signing the National Governors Association (NGA) Graduation Counts Compact. Four years later, progress is steady. Twenty states now report that they use the Compact…

This brief calculates graduation rates for the state of Florida using longitudinal data. The authors describe their measurement strategies and compare them with the state's official measurement procedures. They calculate the diploma and General Education Development (GED) attainment rates of six separate cohorts of Florida 9th graders who began…

School principals have complex jobs. To better understand the work lives of principals, this study uses observational time-use data for all high school principals in Miami-Dade County Public Schools. This paper examines the relationship between the time principals spent on different types of activities and school outcomes including student…

We use data on statewide end-of-course tests in North Carolina to examine the relationship between teacher credentials and student achievement at the high school level. The availability of test scores in multiple subjects for each student permits us to estimate a model with student fixed effects, which helps minimize any bias associated with the…

The first volume of this report examines the existing measures of high school completion and the newly proposed proxy measures. This includes a description of the computational formulas, the data required for each indicator, the assumptions underlying each formula, the strengths and weaknesses of each indicator relative to a true cohort on-time…

The objective of this report was to determine whether the State Education Department (SED) has developed effective processes for (1) ensuring that school districts report violent and disruptive incidents to SED in accordance with State law and regulations, (2) identifying schools that should be designated as persistently dangerous because of their…

The present investigation was aimed at exploring the stability of the standard score distributions on the GED (General Educational Development) Tests taken by U.S. high school seniors in equating studies conducted by GED Testing Service during the span of 5 years from 2001 (the norming year) to 2005. Three questions were addressed by this…

The Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act of 1998 requires that the Secretary provide the appropriate committees of Congress copies of annual reports received by the department from each eligible agency that receives funds under the Act. Congress has made "accountability for results" a central focus of the Perkins III…