This memorandum provides information pertinent to the participation and performance of Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) examinations for 2023 graduates in Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS). In 2023, 59.3% of MCPS graduates took one or more AP exams; 17.3 percentage points more than graduates in Maryland and 24.6…

Research for Action's "Educational Opportunity Dashboard" is an interactive on-line tool to synthesize data and rank all 50 states by how well they provide students access to schools that offer 14 indicators of educational opportunity from the federal Civil Rights Data Collection. On the Dashboard the indicators are compiled into an…

This memorandum provides information pertinent to the participation and performance of Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) examinations for 2022 graduates in Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS). In 2022, 63.2% of MCPS graduates took one or more AP exams--21.9 percentage points more than public school graduates in…

This memorandum provides information pertinent to the participation and performance of Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) examinations for 2021 graduates in Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS). In 2021, 66.6 percent of MCPS graduates took one or more AP exams, a rate that was 23.0 and 31.7 percentage points higher…

This memorandum provides information pertinent to the participation and performance of Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) examinations for 2020 graduates in Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS). In 2020, 66.6 percent of MCPS graduates took one or more AP exams, a rate that was 20.8 and 28.3 percentage points higher…

If students are not able to access internships or career-based programming, they are likely to not acquire skills necessary to be college and career ready. In short, an abundance of research supports the problem of limited preparation of all students for college and career readiness in high school, which also affects success in college and/or…

High school calculus has become indispensable for students seeking a college degree in a STEM field. However, in the present study, we argue that the mathematics opportunities that students seize (when afforded) in middle grades are the key to earning calculus credit in high school. To take calculus in high school, students usually need to take…

Access to higher education begins with a student's decision whether and where to apply to college. This paper examines racial and ethnic differences in college application behavior of high school graduates, using two recent graduation cohorts from Texas. We estimate racial and ethnic differences in the probability of applying to college,…

Pennsylvania's students consistently score above the national average on overall student achievement. However, the state's achievement gaps between White students and Black and Hispanic students are consistently among the worst in the country, even when controlling for gaps in family income, poverty, unemployment, and parental educational…

This study discusses the college and career readiness among full-time Southeast Asian American college students in a 4-year public university in New England. Our study consisted of surveys (n = 58) and focus groups (n = 35), of second-generation (born in the United States) or 1.5-generation (immigrated as a youth) college students. While our…

The "IDRA Newsletter" serves as a vehicle for communication with educators, school board members, decision-makers, parents, and the general public concerning the educational needs of all children across the United States. The focus of this issue is "Data for Actionable Knowledge." Contents include: (1) Office for Civil Rights…

This report provides an update on student retention, graduation, and transfer for first-time, full-time students entering Maryland community colleges. This includes information regarding student outcomes two, three, and four years after initial enrollment at the community college, beginning with students in the 1996 entering cohort. Data are…

This study presents a framework that uses academic trajectories in the middle grades for identifying students in need of intervention and providing targeted support. We apply a set of academic college readiness benchmarks to rich longitudinal data for more than 360,000 students in 5900 schools across 49 states and the District of Columbia. In both…

The purpose of this memorandum is to provide SAT results released by the College Board on October 25, 2018. Participation and performance for the 2018 graduates in the Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) on the redesigned SAT are included in this memorandum. The SAT results for 2017 graduates established a new baseline. College and Career…

Colleges attempt to identify students who are underprepared for college-level courses and then place them into developmental courses intended to help them succeed. These courses are usually offered on a non-credit basis and do not count toward graduation. As a result, students enrolled in developmental education can take longer to graduate than…