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A follow-up to a major national study on the performance of charter school networks shows that they have varied results on their students' high school graduation rates and on their postsecondary enrollment. The study shows that, of the six charter-management organizations for which data were available, three have significant positive impacts on graduation compared to the traditional public schools in their area. One of those organizations increased the probability that its students graduate from high school in four years by 23 percentage points. Two other charter-management groups have positive but not statistically significant impacts on graduation. And one network had a serious negative impact on the graduation rates of its students compared to the local public schools, reducing the probability that students would graduate on time by 22 percentage points.

In the last year there has been quite a bit of media and policy attention put on urban education reform. Feel-good stories about the success of certain charter school models like the Harlem Children's Zone's Promise Academy, The Uncommon Schools network, and the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) abound. These schools, the media narrative goes, are poor, black and brown kids' great hope - promoting higher test scores, increasing high school graduation rates and advocating for higher levels of college attendance. They are certainly newsworthy, but a closer look reveals that the story of their success is more complex than portrayed. According to research available on the KIPP website, though almost 85 percent of the students graduating from their schools go to college, only 30 percent actually graduate. Of course, high school graduation is a worthy goal, and some college-level work is better than none. But according to the 2011 College Board report, in order to impact poverty rates, increase the qualified workforce for American businesses and ensure economic growth nationwide, college graduation is key.

In this paper we consider the challenges involved in evaluating teacher preparation programs when controlling for school contextual bias. Including school fixed effects in the achievement models  used toestimate preparation program effects controls for school environment by relying on differences among student outcomes within the same schools to identify the program effects. However, identification of preparation program effects using school fixed effects requires teachers from different programs to teach in the same school. Even if program effects are identified, the precision of the estimated effects will depend on the degree to which graduates from different programs overlap across schools. In addition, if the connections between preparation programs result from the overlap of atypical graduates or from graduates teaching in atypical school environments, use of school effects could produce bias. Using statewide data from Florida, we show that teachers tend to teach in schools near the programs in which they received their training, but there is still sufficient overlap across schools to identify preparation program effects. We show that the ranking of preparation programs varies significantly depending on whether or not school environment is taken into account via school fixed effects. We find that schools and teachers that are integral to connecting preparation programs are atypical, with disproportionately high percentages of Hispanic teachers and students compared to the state averages. Finally, we  find significant variance inflation in the estimated program effects when controlling for school fixed effects, and that the size of the variance inflation factor depends crucially on the length of the window used to compare graduates teaching in the same schools.

"Evidently, the CEO of Harmony Charter Schools will testify today that Harmony Science Cademy Schools in Texas have a 100% graduation rate. We often hear charter school operators make this claim. Are charters schools really that great? Should we open more charter schools to increase the graduation rate? And what, exactly, are these schools doing to have such extraordinary graduation rates."

What many Americans do not realize is that the program that was dismantled had been extraordinarily successful in graduating Latino students and sending them to college. Nationally, Latino students drop out of high school at a much higher rate than any other racial or ethnic group-about 18 percent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Among Latinos, aged 18 to 24, 27 percent have not graduated from high school, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Nationally, the college-enrollment rate of Latinos, while at an all-time high, is only 32 percent-lower than that of other racial and ethnic groups, according to the same study. In contrast, students completing Tucson's Mexican-American studies program graduate high school and enter college at a higher rate in a district that is 60 percent Latino.

This study examines whether students' enrollment in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Program improves their ACT scores, probability of high school graduation and probability of college enrollment. Using data on the IB enrollment status of 20,422 students attending thirteen CPS high schools from 2002-2008, it estimates that IB enrollment increases students' ACT scores by as much as 0.5 standard deviations and their probability of high school graduation and college enrollment by as much as 17 and 22 percentage points respectively. All of the estimates are highly robust to selection bias. All estimates are greater for boys than for girls. It also calculates that the IB Diploma Program is a cost-effective way to increase high-school graduation rates.

"...The wide gap between the regular graduation rate and the college-ready graduation rate, which was published for the first time this year, complicates Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's effort to show steady improvement in city schools..."

The U.S. Department of Education announced today that this summer states will begin reporting high school graduation rates for the 2010-2011 school year using a more rigorous, uniform four-year adjusted cohort, first developed by the nation's Governors in 2005. Transition to the common rate reflects states' efforts to generate greater uniformity and transparency in calculating high school graduation data, and meets requirements of a federal regulation established in October 2008.

High school students might have to do more than pass their classes and have a good attendance record to earn their diplomas if Iowa joins the growing number of states that require exit exams as a condition of graduation. On Monday, state education officials will release a blueprint outlining the goals of Gov. Terry Branstad's education reform package he plans to take on a town hall tour across the state and then pass on to the Legislature in January. While the specifics haven't been made public, the blueprint is expected to call for changes in teacher pay and evaluations, encouraging the development of charter schools and the development of a new battery of tests that students will have to take --- and possibly pass --- as a condition of graduation

The Boston Teacher Residency is an innovative practice-based preparation program in which candidates work alongside a mentor teacher for a year before becoming a teacher of record in Boston Public Schools. We find that BTR graduates are more racially diverse than other BPS novices, more likely to teach math and science, and more likely to remain teaching in the district through year five. Initially, BTR graduates for whom value-added performance data are available are no more effective at raising student test scores than other novice teachers in English language arts and less effective in math. The effectiveness of BTR graduates in math improves rapidly over time, however, such that by their fourth and fifth years they out-perform veteran teachers. Simulations of the program's overall impact through retention and effectiveness suggest that it is likely to improve student achievement in the district only modestly over the long run.

If you read media reports about education, a lot of the stories you see make extraordinary claims about remarkable, heart-warming turnarounds in student achievement, which are often debunked some time later. This cycle of enthusiasm-debunking-disappointment gets us nowhere in improving outcomes for kids. Genuine miracles--dramatic turnarounds in formerly low-achieving schools--are just as likely in education as they are in any other field. That is, not very likely at all. In fact, most miracles in education turn out on inspection to be due to a change in the students served (as when a new charter or magnet school attracts higher performing students) or changes in demographics (as when school catchment areas are gentrifying). Apparent miracles may be due to changes in tests (as when an entire state gains in one year due to a change to an easier test), or due to other redefinitions of outcomes (as when districts reduce their standards for high school graduation and graduation rates increase). All too often "miracles" never happened at all, as when "turned around" schools deliver poor scores or graduation rates, or when large changes occur for one year but reverse in the following year, or when schools improve on one measure but all other indicators are poor.

After three postponed attempts, New York State is on track to eliminate a set of less demanding exams that thousands of students with disabilities have used to earn diplomas. But where the state is closing a door, it is opening another one - or several. In a proposal that the Board of Regents will discuss at its meeting next week, the State Education Department has suggested creating a new safety net for students with disabilities, many of whom could fail to graduate from high school once they must take the more difficult exams.

We develop a framework that may be used to determine the degree to which a school choice program may harm public school stayers by luring the best students to other schools. This framework results in a simple formula showing that the "cream-skimming" effect is increasing in the degree of heterogeneity within schools, the school choice takeup rate of strong students relative to weak students, and the importance of peers. We use the formula to investigate the effects of a voucher program on the high school graduation rate of the students who would remain in public school. We employ NELS:88 data to measure the characteristics of public school students, to estimate a model of the private school entrance decision, and to estimate peer group effects on graduation. We supplement the econometric estimates with a wide range of alternative assumptions about school choice and peer effects. We find that the cream skimming effect is negative but small and that this result is robust across our specifications.

New York City teenagers attending small public high schools with about 100 students per grade were more likely to graduate than their counterparts at larger schools, according to new findings from a continuing study released on Wednesday night.

McKinsey's experience with school systems in more than 50 countries suggests that this is an important gap in the U.S. debate. In a new report, "Closing the Talent Gap: Attracting and Retaining Top-Third Graduates to Careers in Teaching ," we review the experiences of the top-performing systems in the world-Singapore, Finland, and South Korea. These countries recruit, develop, and retain the leading academic talent as one of their central education strategies, and they have achieved extraordinary results. In the United States, by contrast, only 23 percent of new teachers come from the top third, and just 14 percent in high poverty schools, where the difficulty of attracting and retaining talented teachers is particularly acute. The report asks what it would take to emulate nations that pursue this strategy if the United States decided it was worthwhile. The report also includes new market research with nearly 1,500 current top-third students and teachers. It offers the first quantitative research-based answer to the question of how the U.S. could substantially increase the portion of new teachers each year who are higher caliber graduates, and how this could be done in a cost-effective way.

This paper presents a dynamic model of the decision to pursue a college education in which students face uncertainty about their future income stream after graduation due to unobserved heterogeneity in their innate scholastic ability. After students matriculate and start taking exams, they reevaluate their expectations about succeeding in college and may find it optimal to drop out and join the workforce without completing an undergraduate degree. The model shows that, in accordance with the data, poorer students are less likely to graduate and are more apt to drop out earlier than are wealthier students. Our model generates these results without introducing credit constraints. Conditioning on measures of innate ability, in the data we find that poor students are at least 27 percent more likely to drop out of college and they do so sooner than wealthier students. 

State Education Commissioner John B. King, Jr. told school superintendents from across the state that the education reforms adopted by the New York State Board of Regents will help make high school graduates in New York "college- and career- ready."  King, speaking at the New York State Council of School Superintendents 2011 Fall Leadership Summit in Saratoga Springs, said too many of New York State public high school graduates are not prepared for college and work.  He noted that roughly 40 percent of students entering community colleges across the state have to take remedial classes.

There is much handwringing about low educational attainment in the United States these days. We hear constantly about U.S. rankings on assessments like the international PISA tests: The United States was 14th in reading, 21st in science, 25th in math in 2009, for example. We hear about how young children in high-poverty areas are entering kindergarten unprepared and far behind many of their classmates. Middle school students from low-income families are scoring, on average, far below the proficient levels that would enable them to graduate high school, go to college, and get good jobs. Fewer than half of high school students manage to graduate from some urban schools. And too many poor and minority students who do go on to college require substantial remediation and drop out before gaining a degree. There is another story we rarely hear: Our children who attend schools in low-poverty contexts are doing quite well. In fact, U.S. students in schools in which less than 10 percent of children live in poverty score first in the world in reading, out-performing even the famously excellent Finns.

'Grad Nation," a report released last Monday by Colin Powell's nonprofit group America's Promise, hails New York's "double-digit gains in high school graduation rates." It cites a seemingly laudable spike in the percentage of diplomas handed out throughout the state - from 60 percent in 2002 to 74 percent in 2009. Cause for celebration? More like alarm, we'd say. Because - combined with other, less glowing data - what "Grad Nation" really reveals is that more kids in New York have been let loose to the outside world . . . totally unprepared for what comes next.

...this year's crop of seniors is the third-to-last that will ever graduate from Columbus. The school is in the process of being closed because of its low performance, despite valiant efforts to fend off the city's decision that included hearings, lawsuits, and two attempts at charter school conversion. This year, no new ninth-graders enrolled, and Columbus is scheduled to graduate its last students in 2014. It is now just one of seven schools sharing space in the four-story stone building that once housed it alone.