In January 2000, the Alternative and Safe Schools Instructional and Support Division (ASSIS) of the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NC DPI) was charged with developing guidelines that determined how districts could establish and maintain effective Alternative Learning Programs (NC DPI, 2014). In 2003, ASSIS produced the first…

Recent policy efforts have attempted to increase the number of dual enrollment courses offered within Career and Technical Education (CTE) pathways, and there is evidence to suggest that this practice is widespread. However, there is very little research on student participation in CTE dual enrollment and on its impacts. This study examines…

Since 2001, Congress has debated legislation that would offer a pathway to legal status for eligible unauthorized immigrants who arrived in the United States as children. And in 2012, President Barack Obama launched the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that offers work authorization and relief from deportation for some such…

Enrollment of underrepresented African American (URAA) males in higher education has declined significantly over the last decades. Past studies have identified interrelated factors that impact degree attainment for underrepresented students. Researchers typically attribute those factors to African American males' success and degree attainment.…

Parent involvement during the transition planning meetings prior to graduation was aligned with real student success in post-secondary outcomes of work or education. When parents were not aware or had access to resources for supporting successful transitions, special needs students suffered, specifically of African American culture. This study…

Utilizing a lottery-based natural experiment, this study assessed the longer-term impact of early colleges on postsecondary degree attainment. It found that early colleges significantly increased the overall degree completion and associate degree completion rates within 10 years of expected high school graduation. While the impact on bachelor's…

Summer melt occurs when a student who intends to go to college does not enroll in the fall semester after senior year. The purpose of this study was to examine why high school graduates, who in the spring of their senior year of high school had intentions to go to college, did not enroll in college the fall semester immediately after graduation…

The U.S. Department of Education introduced the four-year adjusted cohort high school graduation rate formula in 2008 to usher high school graduation in as a high-stakes accountability metric. This policy sought to address disparate graduation rates by student race but did not attend to systemic reasons why minoritized students had lower…

This mixed method sequential explanatory study provided analysis of North Carolina (NC) school leaders' dispositions in eliminating opportunity gaps, outlined in NC's strategic plan. The study's quantitative phase used descriptive and correlation analysis of eight Likert subscales around four tenets of transformative leadership (Shields, 2011) and…

Background/Context: The underrepresentation of students from lower socioeconomic status (LSES) backgrounds among college graduates with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) degrees, and consequently in STEM occupations, is a concern with respect to reducing, perpetuating, or increasing social inequality. The loss of their…

Federal requirements stipulate that states and local education agencies annually calculate and report an Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate, disaggregated by student group. The ACGR includes all students who graduate from high school in four years with a regular high school diploma, plus all students with the most significant cognitive disabilities…

The purpose of this qualitative transcendental phenomenological research was to describe the experiences of students of alternative North Carolina high schools as they transitioned from traditional conventional high schools to an exclusively online curriculum at alternative high schools and to understand the impact of that educational format on…

To prepare high school graduates with visual impairments for college, staff members at Perkins School for the Blind developed a nine month residential program, College Success@Perkins. This article describes components of the program design and provides data on eight students who successfully completed the program in the first cohort. It concludes…

We examine the long-run impacts of having a same-race teacher. First, we leverage data from the Tennessee STAR class-size experiment to show that black students randomly assigned to a black teacher in grades K-3 are 5 percentage points (7%) more likely to graduate from high school and 4 percentage points (13%) more likely to enroll in college than…

Increasingly, state departments of education, school districts, and high schools are recognizing that many students graduate from high school underprepared for college-level coursework in mathematics. Many are referred to remedial education when they arrive at college. To help students become better prepared for college and avoid remedial courses…