For schools and teachers to help students develop knowledge and skills, students need to show up to class. Yet absenteeism is high, especially in high schools. This study uses a rich dataset tracking class attendance by day for over 50,000 middle and high school students from an urban district in Academic Years 2007-'08 through 2012-'13. Our…

Social promotion is an ongoing issue in education and is frequently seen as a dichotomy with retention. While retention is a commonly researched topic, the information regarding the academic and behavioral outcomes of socially promoted students is much sparser. The problem is that many students who are socially promoted into high school after…

Increasingly, student success in college is gauged by retention and graduation rates. Understanding the factors that influence student success can assist practitioners in terms of programming and institutional investments. This study evaluated factors such as residential living, attendance programs, demographic attributes, average class size, and…

Driven by a combination of concern for historically high suspension rates and substantial disproportionalities in suspension use, a recent wave of education reforms encourages schools to reduce their use of suspensions for student behavior management. Both academic and political discourse has focused on the extensive use of suspension for…

Driven by a combination of concern for historically high suspension rates and substantial disproportionalities in suspension use, a recent wave of education reforms encourages schools to reduce their use of suspensions for student behavior management. Both academic and political discourse has focused on the extensive use of suspension for…

The purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of early preparation for postsecondary education and explore the effectiveness of Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs (GEAR UP). This comparative case study included 836 students from two cohorts (GEAR UP and Non GEAR UP). We compared high school attendance,…

In the 2012/13 school year American Indian students accounted for 1.1 percent of K-12 students nationwide and 1.4 percent of K-12 students in North Carolina (U.S. Department of Education, n.d.). Research has identified substantial achievement gaps between American Indian and other students on national tests, in graduation rates, and in…

This study sought to identify features of peer victimization that aggravate negative outcomes in children. The features that were assessed include "power imbalance," a commonly used criterion in defining bullying, and 5 other characteristics: injury, weapon involvement, Internet involvement, sexual content, and bias content. Three…

This study examined the influence of student demographic variables (i.e., SES, race, attendance, and gender) and the school variable of placement in an inclusion setting on the academic achievement of general education students in grades 6, 7, and 8 (n = 1200) in an urban school district as measured by the 2010-2011 NJASK, the state's annual…

Truancy is an important issue facing U.S. school systems as it is known that students who are truant are more likely to participate in criminal activity later in life (Baker, Sigmon & Nugent, 2001; Henry & Thornberry, 2010). This study examines recent data from students at 21 schools within a large midwestern school district. Survival…

Many U.S. schools use visible security measures (security cameras, metal detectors, security personnel) in an effort to keep schools safe and promote adolescents' academic success. This study examined how different patterns of visible security utilization were associated with U.S. middle and high school students' academic performance, attendance,…

While instructional time is viewed as crucial to learning, little is known about the effectiveness of reducing absences relative to increasing the number of school days. In this regard, this paper jointly estimates the effect of absences and length of the school calendar on test score performance. Using administrative data from North Carolina…

One provocative explanation for the continued persistence of minority achievement gaps involves the performance-dampening anxiety thought to be experienced by minority students in highly evaluative settings (i.e., "stereotype threat"). Recent field-experimental studies suggest that modest, low-cost "buffering" interventions…

This study investigated the unique relations between school concentrations of student risk factors and measures of reading, mathematics, and attendance. It used an integrated administrative data system to create a combined data set of risks (i.e., birth risks, teen mother, low maternal education, homelessness, maltreatment, and lead exposure) for…

This report uses statistics to examine current conditions and changes over time in education activities and outcomes for different racial/ethnic groups in the United States. This report shows that over time, students in the racial/ethnic groups of White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, American Indian/Alaska…