U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan argued in a 2010 address to the College Board, "High schools must shift from being last stop destinations for students on their education journey to being launching pads for further growth and lifelong learning for all students. The mission of high schools can no longer be to simply get students to…

Recently, researchers have begun to employ rigorous statistical methods and developmentally-informed theories to evaluate outcomes for students retained in non-kindergarten early elementary school. However, the majority of this research focuses on academic outcomes. Gaps remain regarding retention's effects on psychosocial outcomes important to…

This study introduces a new set of weighting procedures for revealing the mediation mechanism in multi-level settings. These methods are illustrated through an investigation of whether the impact of a system-wide policy change on student outcomes is mediated by policy-induced peer composition change. When the policy changed not only…

This study seeks to demonstrate a method for treatment effect estimation in a multisite observational study where the treatment is highly selective and the assignment mechanism varies across sites. The method is demonstrated by addressing three primary research questions about the effect of 8th grade algebra: (1) For students who take algebra in…