The Big 12 is famous for its athletics--and well it should be. But what about the rest of the conference--the academic part? The Big 12's website says, "Performance in the classroom is just as important as accolades on the field." So what's happening off the field? How do the Big 12 schools fare when it comes to cost and quality? The…

Colorado is in the middle of the dropout epidemic facing the nation--in fact its dropout rate is significantly higher than most states. For the sake of the students and the state, it is a crisis Colorado cannot afford to ignore. A combined total of 48,526 students dropped out of Colorado's public school system during the three school years between…

Recent studies have discussed the growing gap of college attendance and graduation rates of women and girls. While the rate of White women's college attendance and graduation now surpasses that of men, this has been the case for Black women for over a century. Throughout the twentieth century until the present, Black women have earned more college…

America's high schools face the challenge of improving student learning in an ever-changing global world (Marx, 2006). Fueling the need for reform is the urgency of graduating more highly skilled citizens and the demands from federal and state government. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and state legislation make today's high schools more accountable…

Schools with large numbers of students falling off the graduation path need comprehensive reforms that create a solid foundation of high-quality instruction and positive behavioral supports for all students. They also need data-driven response systems that provide targeted and intensive interventions for students who need additional academic and…

Through sustained community organizing and strategic partnerships, the Mobile (Alabama) County Public School System is improving achievement and creating beat-the-odds schools that set and achieve high academic expectations despite the challenges of poverty and racial disparity. The authors chart how Mobile's Research Alliance for Multiple…

To improve our understanding of the factors that influence persistence rates in STEM field majors, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation provided a grant to the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute in 2007 to study the question. The five papers in the symposium represent the output of the project. This introduction explains the motivation for…

Learning Support probation results in the loss of financial aid, tuition, housing revenues, and lowering of both retention and graduation rates. Because of these consequences, an initiative was formed to assist these students and decrease the number of students put on probation or suspended due to failure to complete Learning Support requirements.…

The relationship between degree of academic support center use and college success was examined in a population of 262 college students with learning disabilities. Five years of attendance data and graduation rates were examined and submitted to discriminant function analysis to evaluate the predictive influence of academic support center use on…

Research points to links between school and school district leadership and student achievement. Local and national education reform has created rising expectations for student performance. Education leadership is both complex and high stakes. Key stakeholders in Georgia have developed a solution to improve factors in the work, workplace, and…

This compliance report provides information regarding American Indian students' public school performance and how performance is measured. This information is shared with legislators, educators, tribes, communities and is disseminated at the semiannual government-to-government meetings. The New Mexico Public Education Department (NMPED) is…

Estimates say that nearly 30 percent of adults in the United States have a criminal record--roughly 65 million individuals. While not all of them have served a jail or prison sentence, they nonetheless face barriers to gainful employment due to the stigma of a record, as well as generally lower levels of education and job training. The overall…

In 2002, the Stark County Preschool through College (P-16) Compact set the goal of achieving an 80% college going rate. Such a goal seemed both audacious and daunting for a community where in 2001 only 17.9% of the adults held a Bachelor's Degree, or higher, and where only 49% of all high school graduates went directly to college. Nine years have…

Low rates of college completion have long been a major deficiency in the performance of American higher education. Over the last decade, the extent and importance of the problem was documented by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education in the "Measuring Up" national and state report cards on higher education, and by…

The information in this report is presented to encourage continued conversation regarding preparation for college and remedial or developmental education in Colorado. This report documents action taken and data gathered by the Colorado Department of Higher Education (DHE) for academic year 2010 (Summary 2009-Spring 2010) as required by statute to…