Participants at a national conference on the school/college relationship make comments and recommendations in four areas: college admission policies, the role of testing in college admission, avenues for collaboration, and the impact of college admission standards on high school course enrollment. (MD)

Reports changes in high school graduation requirements in general and English requirements in particular and discusses in more detail the proposed changes in the grade 10 practical English curriculum (MM)

To determine the status of the Oregon Graduation Requirements Law and the directions being taken in its implementation, a site visit was made to Oregon and educators in a number of school districts were interviewed. Also, samples of curriculum guides and administrative reports were collected and studied. (Author)

Presently, state and federal school accountability efforts require greater attention to performance measures, such as the graduation rate, which serve as key indicators of a school's success in educating its student population. AZLEARNS, Arizona's school accountability system, includes a school classification system based on a set of performance…

This is the second in a series of issue briefs to be written for The Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement during 2006. In this issue brief, the author examines what recent research says about high school dropouts and explains the powerful role schools can play in keeping students on track to graduate. The latter includes…

Few people seriously regard students as "products" coming off an educational assembly line, but notions about accountability and quality improvement in higher education are pervaded by manufacturing ideas and metaphors. Because numerical indicators of quality are inevitably expressed by trend lines or statistical control chars of some kind, they…

Community colleges are open-door institutions serving many students with academic, economic, and personal characteristics that can make college completion a challenge. Their graduation rates are low, but community college students do not always have earning a degree as their goal. While individual students may feel that their experience at a…

This report presents the findings of a study designed by the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education to identify the institutional characteristics, practices, and policies that might account for differences in retention and graduation rates among colleges and universities that serve high concentrations of low-income…

As the majority of the graduation class, transfer students are neither being counted into the college graduation rate nor giving entrant institutions positive effect on retention. The study examines 906 students of 2002 transfer cohort in a public four-year institution. The study found the majority of the transfer students were female and white,…

This biweekly newsletter contains news and information about school improvement in the United States. It is designed expressly for parents and families. This issue highlights an announcement, by U.S. Department of Education Secretary Rod Paige, of a contract to the National Institute of Statistical Sciences to convene a group of experts to review…

This series tracks the performance of Chicago, Illinois, public high school students from 1993 to 2000 using data from the last 2 years of Phase 1 reform as a baseline for looking at the first 5 years of Phase 2. This report tracks changes in high school enrollment and explores possible causes. Analyses of data from various sources show that the…

This school report follows Vivaldi students in two ways. First, it tracks for five year members of the eighth-grade class of 1997 who enrolled in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) high schools or Academic Preparatory Centers (APCs). Second, it follows members of the eighth grade classes of 1997 to 2001 for one year to show their achievement during…

A new service, TransferTrack, was developed by the National Student Loan Clearinghouse, that will enable postsecondary educational institutions to identify which of their former students have subsequently re-enrolled at other institutions and the identity of such institutions. This system will allow institutions to comply more easily with the…

This report provides a broad overview of postsecondary opportunity and achievement in the state of Washington, posing three questions: (1) who is ready for postsecondary education? (2) who begins postsecondary education? and (3) who completes postsecondary education? Data are from the administrative records of Washington's public high schools,…

National studies of students, and studies that compare institutions, have identified many predictors of students' graduation rates, including socioeconomic status and admission selectivity. When there predictive variables are applied to data from an individual school, it may be found that they have less predictive power. This paper presents a…