Vocational Education and Training (VET) programs are prevalent in a European context, but often struggle with drop-out rates that exceed those of general upper-secondary education. Using Danish administrative data, we study the effects of reform-induced reductions in shares of VET students who did not pass their lower secondary final exams on…

Developmental education, in which college students deemed unprepared for college-level coursework enroll in non-credit bearing courses, is widespread in American higher education. The current study evaluates the effect of mobile app courseware on the college outcomes of developmental education students, using a research design which randomly…

In this report, the authors present the results of a long-term tracking study that follows 1,177 students who applied to enter 1 of 13 oversubscribed Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) middle schools through a 5th or 6th grade admissions lottery in 2008 or 2009. Those students are now old enough to have attended college for at least two years. This…

The "Professional Development Incentives for Oregon's Early Childhood Education Workforce: A Randomized Study" examined whether professional development incentives for the Oregon early childhood education (ECE) workforce members increased career lattice sign-up and increased education and training levels or workplace retention. The study…

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the implementation and impacts of the Building Assets, Reducing Risks (BARR) model in its first year of implementation in 66 schools across the U.S. and to document scale-up progress during the Investing in Innovation (i3) grant period (2017-2021). The impact evaluation included 21,529 9th grade students…

The current study examines how the integration of SAT scores with context information about students' neighborhood and high school from the College Board's Landscape™ resource can provide institutions with a nuanced perspective on students' expected performance and retention. This allows institutions to identify incoming students that may benefit…

London schools continue to constitute an extraordinary "success story." By common consent, the government school system in London achieves extremely good results compared to the rest of England, and students from disadvantaged backgrounds do particularly well. In 2014, the authors sought to document and provisionally explain the London…

In 2013, the Indiana Commission for Higher Education passed a resolution to cut the achievement gap in half by 2018 and close the achievement gap by 2025. The College Equity report provides a snapshot of Indiana's college achievement gap progress -- measured by the college-going rate, early success in college and college completion -- for…

We present evidence from an ongoing field experiment in college coaching/mentoring. The experiment is designed to ask whether mentoring plus cash incentives provided to high school students late in their senior year have meaningful impacts on college going and persistence. For women, we find large impacts on the decision to enroll in college and…

Business as usual has not provided educational opportunities to world's most marginalized children. The South Asia Out-of-School Children Initiative (OOSCI) is part of the global initiative launched by UNICEF and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) in 2010. The goal of the initiative is to make significant and sustained reduction in the…

The Wake County Public School System's (WCPSS) retention rate has declined for the fifth year in a row. The vast majority of WCPSS' students are promoted to the next grade level at the end of each school year. In 2011-12, only 3.4% of WCPSS students were retained in grade. While only a small percentage of students are retained each year, this…

One objective of the U.S. Department of Education's (ED) School Improvement Grants (SIG) and Race to the Top (RTT) program is to help states enhance their capacity to support the turnaround of low-performing schools. This capacity may be important, given how difficult it is to produce substantial and sustained achievement gains in low-performing…

One way to improve struggling schools' access to effective teachers is to use selective transfer incentives. Such incentives offer bonuses for the highest-performing teachers to move into schools serving the most disadvantaged students. In this report, we provide evidence from a randomized experiment that tested whether such a policy intervention…

Since 1986, Intercultural Development Research Association (IDRA) has conducted an annual attrition study to track the number and percent of students in Texas who are lost from public secondary school enrollment prior to graduation. The study builds on the series of studies that began when IDRA conducted the first comprehensive study of school…

This report combines syntheses of prior research with new analyses of previously collected data to address trends for minority group participation in higher education over the past 25 years. Two chapters focus on the aggregate impact of individual choices and behaviors in college attendance. Chapter 1 describes trends in minority enrollment and…