A study examined the outcomes of taking different balances of career and technical education (CTE) and academic courses. The study sample consisted of members of the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88) who were eighth-graders in 1988. The study sample members were divided into four groups as follows: (1) academic concentrators…

With No Child Left Behind's call for highly qualified teachers, the stakes for recruiting and retaining teachers have never been more important. Alabama, like other states, has struggled to develop policies and programs that effectively staff all classrooms with quality educators. The Center for Teaching Quality, with the support of SERVE, has…

In 2004-2005, North Carolina's average teacher turnover rate was nearly 13 percent, ranging from a high of 29 percent to a low of 4 percent. Turnover among teachers in low-performing schools was substantially higher, with a low of 12 percent and a high of 57 percent. North Carolina has put strategies in place to address teacher retention but how…

Curriculum is the educational blueprint for institutions. Without it, they would not exist. Curriculum is their product; it provides the concepts, skills, and motivation that students need to shape their futures. From book-driven curriculum to the highest, technologically driven curriculum, an institution's main goal is to ensure that students…

Countries around the world have achieved huge gains in primary education, reaching a world average of 83.8 percent in net primary enrollment. However, large numbers of students still do not complete primary education, and even fewer continue on to secondary school. Since so few children complete primary school, those who do must be able to…

To track student progress and develop a model of the total academic process at Prince George's Community College (PGCC), the Office of Institutional Research and Analysis acquired 5 years of background, behavioral, and outcome data for a cohort of first-time students entering the college. The academic process was broken down into three divisions:…

This report presents estimated data on the exit reasons for students with disabilities projected to leave Illinois public schools after the 1997-98 school year. The data were prepared by averaging the information provided by school districts regarding students who were no longer receiving special education services during the 1995-96 and 1996-97…

This study sought to determine factors affecting retention of minority students in graduate and professional science degree programs. The study was a variation of Vincent Tinto's (1987) student retention model, which relates retention to complex interactions between social integration and academic integration. In this study, interviews were…

This brief report describes efforts of the Oklahoma State Regents to accelerate positive academic change in the state's higher education system with a combination of strengthened admission, retention, and assessment standards. The first section presents the state's problem of lagging performance during the late 1980s, as indicated by data showing…

This report discusses trends in California's teaching force for 2002: shortage of qualified teachers (e.g., the shortage varies across different subjects and is expected to worsen due to teacher retirements and growth in numbers of students); getting good teachers (e.g., California's underprepared teachers continue to be inequitably distributed…

This final report summarizes the 2003 National Teacher Education Institute (TEI) for Career and Technical Teacher Education (CTTE). The theme of the Institute was "Pathways to the Future: Preparing and Developing Secondary and Postsecondary Career and Technical Education Teachers." The 118 participants included representatives from…

As a response to the problems of nontraditional student attrition at two-year and four-year urban colleges, this paper introduces the constructs of career decision-making self-efficacy, perceived stress, and financial difficulty into a model built on the synthesis of Cabrera (1993). A questionnaire was administered to adult nontraditional (age 24…

This study, which is a companion to a study on 10-year enrollment and graduation patterns for new freshmen and transfers, sought to quantify how much more likely college students were to graduate if they were transfers, were enrolled continuously, were mostly full-time, and began their academic careers with good first-semester grade point averages…

This study examined effects of increased availability of undergraduate student loan funds under the Higher Education Act Amendments of 1992. It studied the effects of price variables and accumulated debt on student persistence decisions using data from the National Student Postsecondary Aid 1992-93 and 1995-96 Surveys. For two-year college…

This paper reviews research on best practices for preventing students with mild disabilities from dropping out of high school. Findings from the literature review indicate there is a consensus among the researchers that warning signs for school dropout among students with mild disabilities include: poor attendance, academic difficulties,…