The Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA) of 2004 established a requirement that all states develop and submit to the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) a performance plan designed to improve the educational and functional outcomes for children with disabilities. The state plan must…

Howard Bowen (1996) wryly observed decades ago that colleges and universities raise all the money they can, and then they spend it. His point was that institutions have more good ideas than they can fully fund. As a consequence, they are constantly making choices as to how to best use their finite resources. Where and how resources are allocated…

Starting a new position is exhilarating. The key challenge is to make the strange familiar as soon as possible. There are new policies to learn, new colleagues to get to know, and new surroundings to adapt to. All these aspects and more need to be understood and managed well in order to focus on the primary task at hand--teaching and learning. Of…

More than 300 tribal representatives and educators from across New Mexico met at Ohkay Owingeh on December 19, 2005, to discuss ways to improve education for American Indian students in New Mexico. The Summit was a collaborative effort by New Mexico's Office of Indian Affairs, Public Education Department, Higher Education Department, and tribal…

Controversies over graduation rates and No Child Left Behind have raged in research, media and political circles for almost a year. All too often, though, when complex issues of social and economic importance collide with policy and politics, heat is generated but little light. As a result, it may be difficult for local educators to parse the…

National data indicate that many differences remain between Hispanics and non-Hispanics regarding baccalaureate attainment, even though the general status of Hispanics in higher education has improved. Official data on California students suggest that there is no single point in the California educational pipeline that accounts for the entire gap…

Upward Bound is a federally funded program designed to prepare economically and educationally disadvantaged high school students for postsecondary education. Each year, approximately thirty-three thousand students are served by the more than four hundred Upward Bound programs. Several studies have documented the success of Upward Bound programs in…

The purpose of this study was to examine the variables that are associated with the percentage of students who pass Tennessee's Gateway exams in high school. Associations were examined between the Gateway exams and variables such as: socioeconomic status, ethnicity, dropout rate, graduation rate, attendance, average daily membership, per-pupil…

This report describes the effects of Project Graduation Really Achieves Dreams (GRAD) on student progress at three high schools in Houston (the initiative's original site) and at high schools in two other school districts (Columbus, Ohio, and Atlanta, Georgia). MDRC--a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization--conducted a third-party…

The colleges in the Illinois Community College System submit detailed credit student records twice during each fiscal year. This year's report is based on fiscal year 2005 enrollments and completions. Comparative information is supplied from four previous fiscal years (2001-2004). Detailed tables comparing fiscal year 2004 and fiscal year 2005…

This report describes the best practices described by national experts, some of the actions that are currently being taken by Colorado institutions of higher education and recommendations for improving programs to retain and graduate minority and low-income students. Over the course of the taskforce's meetings, it became clear that Colorado's…

Using data on 11,000 graduate students from 100 departments over a 20 year period, I test whether graduate student outcomes (graduation rates, time to degree, publication success, and initial job placement) differ based on a student's gender and marital status. I find that married men have better outcomes across every measure than single men.…

This is a study of high schools and their districts receiving Comprehensive School Reform (CSR) grants that have used those grants to support implementation of the Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) model. Over a 4-year period 10 such high schools in 5 districts have been examined to determine if schoolwide or district-wide…

This publication provides a closer look at data reported annually by South Carolina's public institutions of higher education as part of institutional effectiveness reporting and as part of the process of performance funding. Prior to the January 2000 edition, this document was entitled "Minding Our P's and Q's: Indications of Productivity…

The purpose of the study was to explore the academic careers of students who took AP Exams and to compare their careers with those who did not take AP Exams. For most AP Exams, students with AP grades of 3 or better had higher grade averages in intermediate college courses than did non-AP students who first took an introductory course. Two…