"Straight A's: Public Education Policy and Progress" is a biweekly newsletter that focuses on education news and events both in Washington, DC and around the country. The following articles are included in this issue: (1) Achieve and NGA Host National Education Summit on High Schools: Governors, Educators, and Business Leaders Meet to Discuss High…

The English Language Arts Standard Course of Study establishes competency goals and objectives for the teaching and learning of English Language Arts in North Carolina. This document details the English Language Arts content that should be taught in all schools. The entire K-12 North Carolina English Language Arts Standard Course of Study was last…

This document contains data and characteristics of the Illinois public community college system and is designed to serve as a basic reference. The data are obtained from various surveys and studies conducted by Illinois Community College Board (ICCB) staff, and from the colleges' annual MIS submissions. The document contains annual data for fiscal…

This report addresses the reporting requirements of Public Law 26-26 and the provisions of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) as described in the Department of Education's Board-adopted District Action Plan (DAP). The law specifically requires Guam Department of Education to include the following information in the Annual State of Public Education…

This is the fourth annual report to Congress by the US Department of Education. Among the highlights of this report are: (1) More students were reported by states as having enrolled in vocational and technical education courses in Program Year (PY) 2002-2003 than in the past three years; (2) There remain concerns about the quality and reliability…

This report explains that in state after state, the percentage of minority teachers is not increasing as fast as the percentage of minority students, and the gap is not narrowing. Many states took action in the 1990s by offering more scholarships and incentives for minority students to attend college and, in several cases, by making major efforts…

This paper is organized around three central questions: (1) What should be the primary goals of high school reform and what is the critical set of outcomes that matter for students? (2)Shat do we know about the strategies schools could use to pursue those goals? and (3) What are the implications of these strategies for the development of high…

Looking back upon the centuries one would suspect that in earlier ages universities of medieval France and Italy were very different from the multiplicity of organizational and institutional forms of higher education institutions in modern times, and yet one would be surprised how much these old "universitas" and modern universities have…

This report is prepared annually by the Nevada System of Higher Education (NSHE) to provide an overview of: (1) the enrollment of members of racial/ethnic groups as students at NSHE institutions; (2) graduation rates for each institution broken down by each racial/ethnic group; and (3) the number of women and members of racial/ethnic groups…

This report assesses where America's Great City Schools (GCS) were on the National Urban Education goals in 1996-97 and how they compared to where they were in 1990-91. The National Urban Education Goals address the unique and pressing needs of urban schools and provide an enabling set of targets on the way toward achieving national goals. This…

This paper discusses degree attainment statistics and their analyses, particularly when applying time censors to the equation. The author describes at the High School and Beyond Sophomore Cohort Longitudinal Study, which followed a high school graduating class of 1982, from the time of its graduation until 1993, when most of the cohort was 29 or…

This study provides a thorough examination of the experiences of a group of students who transferred from a public community college in the Midwest to a nearby public residential university between spring 1994 and spring 2001. The study population consisted of 552 students who transferred from the community college to the university with 12 or…

This report describes a study of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), a reform effort tying academic achievement with district funding. The purpose of the study was to determine which variables best explained and predicted MCAS test scores (scores had been rising). One such variable was accountability. The report states the…

This study examined program participation and academic progress of second language learners, following a cohort of Texas public school students from the school years, 1992-93 to 1999-00 as they progressed through the elementary and middle grades. Researchers examined the following: changes in Texas policy related to students with limited English…

This study used publicly available information to identify institutional controllable variables that influence graduation rate and to group colleges using these factors. The dependent variable for the correlation analysis was the six-year graduation rate of the fall 1993 freshman cohort (as reported by US News and World Report) at more than 1,400…