A fifth-year high school teacher recounts her experiences with her students and her sense of loss after their graduation. She describes her initial apprehensions about getting along with the new group and the way she accepted the new seniors without comparing them with her previous batch.

Policy makers really sounded off this spring about public education. State legislators derided No Child Left Behind (NCLB) for taking away state prerogatives in setting education policy and the National Governors Association essentially tell federal officials to stay away from repeating NCLB at the high school level. President Bush tried to move…

The purpose of this study was to determine football coaches' perceptions about support services for two-year college student-athletes. A telephone interview was used to collect data about Personal Services, Career Services, and Academic Services that were available for football players at 33 two-year colleges in 11 states. All two-year colleges…

One of the aims of the standards and accountability movement is to make intellectually demanding course work in high school the norm. Significant progress has been made towards this goal. Expecting all students to engage in and succeed with challenging work in high school, however, places on high schools demands they have not been historically…

Few studies examine whether financial aid affects college retention. This paper uses University of Oregon data to examine financial aid's affect on retention net of uniquely detailed enrollee attributes and conditioned on unobserved enrollee attributes identified by jointly modeling retention and enrollment. The results show that need- and…

The focus of the paper is the development of a novel conceptual framework that aims to remedy a critical mis-specification in prior research on the impact of financial aid on academic outcomes: the blending of the effect of aid eligibility with the influence of aid amounts on academic outcomes. To assess the impact of aid amounts received on…

Amid growing criticism of public universities, there is little discussion of what appropriate institutional evaluation would entail. Six-year graduation rates are commonly used, and public bachelors granting institutions have lower rates than private institutions, but with the growth in non-traditional college attendance, these can be misleading.…

The question addressed in this paper is whether there are signs that students' progression through high school to graduation has been affected by the efforts to increase school accountability, including high-stakes exit exams. If such accountability systems were able to raise student academic performance significantly in elementary and middle…

What steps are needed to be taken to rebuild public investment in America's higher education? In this article, the author offers three actions which he believes the US higher education community must collectively embrace and suggests that the higher education community should also learn to speak with a common voice. To help put that idea into…

This study explored factors that lead alternative education program completers eventually to drop out of school. When compared with alternative school peers who went on to graduate, certain differences emerge. Those disengaging are more likely to be students of color with lower achievement scores who do not easily engage with school or prosocial…

There are many reasons a student may become disinterested in academics and many ways they can fail in school and in society. Most educators will quickly admit nothing is more fulfilling than seeing a troubled student succeed in school and earn a diploma. The state of Wisconsin recognized this, a full decade before the No Child Left Behind Act, and…

According to a February 9, 2006 "New York Times" story headlined, "Panel Explores Standard Tests for Colleges," a new accountability era is descending upon a resistant higher education domain. The story describes the deliberations of a Bush-appointed commission considering imposition of standardized tests on college students. Ten days earlier, the…

An increasing number of urban districts are scrapping traditional high school grade structures, changing their retention policies, and devising more flexible routes toward graduation to address high dropout rates. Educators in Baltimore, Boston, Houston and Rochester, New York say they are particularly focused on the 9th grade, a year when many…

New Jersey leaders have launched a campaign to build support for boosting high school rigor, but some are worried that the effort could produce a higher dropout rate as the state phases out an alternative exam used by nearly 15 percent of its students. Part of the state's bid to raise expectations involves scrapping the Special Review Assessment,…

This report provides information on the outcomes of the Intervention for College Attendance Program, a program of competitive grants awarded to postsecondary institutions, professional organizations and community-based organizations. Funded programs focus on increasing the access and success of groups traditionally underrepresented in higher…