Students who delay immediate postsecondary enrollment may forego individual benefits, or represent misplaced resources for higher education institutions by not persisting once enrolled. Understanding the various pathways of diverse students is especially important in states that are experiencing a major demographic shift. Using a multi-agency…

Dual credit courses are legislated course enrollment options available to ninth- to twelfth-grade students in the State of Texas. The dual credit program provides the opportunity for all high school students, regardless of grade level, to earn college credits while working toward a high school diploma (Houston ISD, 2018). There is no limit to the…

This study examines the likelihood that a student will receive a school disciplinary action, such as in-school or out-of-school suspension. Analyses of district-wide data for the 2014-15 academic year indicate that both student and school factors play an important role. Net of other factors, the strongest predictors of school discipline are school…

Background: Educational outcomes for language minority (LM) children are of great concern across the nation because these students have lower grades, are rated by their teachers as having lower skills, perform worse on standardized tests, and are more likely to drop out than are non-LM students. Given this context of underperformance, there is a…

Concern about kindergarten retention is on the rise within the current climate of high-stakes testing and escalating kindergarten expectations. Kindergarten retention has been linked in previous research to various risk factors such as poverty, low maternal education, single parent status, minority status, English language learner (ELL) status,…

This study examined the extent to which end-of-course grades are predictive of Virginia Standards of Learning test scores in nine high school content areas. It also analyzed the impact of the variables school cluster attended, gender, ethnicity, disability status, Limited English Proficiency status, and socioeconomic status on the relationship…

Sixty-three percent of AISD's Class of 2013 graduates enrolled in a postsecondary institution the year after high school, and 74% of Class of 2012 graduates persisted in college for a second year. A supplemental report (published separately) provides technical documentation. [For the technical documentation report, see ED626499.]

The purpose of the current study was to determine the relationship, if any, regarding school districts' teachers' average years of service, number of years of implementation of the CSCOPE math curriculum, and student achievement on the STAAR (State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness) mathematics scores in Grades 5 and 8. The STAAR is the…

The purpose of the 2013-2014 Georgia's Pre-K Program Evaluation was to examine the learning outcomes for children and the quality of their classrooms during Pre-K, as the baseline year of the Pre-K through third-grade longitudinal study. The primary evaluation questions addressed included: (1) What are the learning outcomes for children attending…

This study examined the relationships between teacher leadership, science teacher self-efficacy, and fifth-grade science student achievement in diverse schools in a San Antonio, Texas, metropolitan school district. Teachers completed a modified version of the "Leadership Behavior Description Question" (LBDQ) Form XII by Stogdill (1969),…

A latent growth model was used to investigate the longer term efficacy of phonics and integrated language arts instruction as well as amount of such instruction on children's reading development, using the nationally representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Study data set (kindergarten through fifth grade). Type and amount of instruction were…

This study of graduation outcomes in Baltimore uses multivariate analysis of longitudinal student cohort data to examine the impact of factors identified in previous research as early warning indicators of a dropout outcome. Student cohort files were constructed from longitudinal administrative data (following all first-time 2004-2005 and…

Comparing a small, rural school with sometimes less than 100 students to a massive inner-city school with greater than 2,500 students is crude and untenable. There are simply too many variables. Nonetheless, the No Child Left Behind Act treats these two very different schools the same. When urban and rural schools cannot meet AYP or highly…

In this report on AISD students, with a focus on the graduating class of 2009, the most powerful predictors of overall student dropout risk were having an 8th-grade attendance rate of less than 90% and failing both the 8th-grade reading and math TAKS tests. A separate research brief also was published. [For the research brief, see ED628171.]

The process by which schools decline over time has not received the same media or scholarly attention as school improvement. The imperative to improve chronically low-performing schools has led educators, policymakers, and researchers to tinker with school reforms without fully understating how and why failure developed in the first place.…