The 4-year graduation rate for Colorado students in foster care decreased substantially from the 2015-2016 school year to the 2016-2017 school year, from 33.2% to 23.6%. This study examines trends in state-level child welfare and education data to uncover possible explanations for this decline. Students in the 2017 foster care cohort tended to…

In the fall of 2013, Fountain-Fort Carson High School implemented a new "Advisory Period" for all students at all grade levels. Incoming ninth-grade students were randomly assigned a faculty advisor and stayed with the advisor over the course of their 4 years of high school. School counselors wrote the Advisory programming which included…

Charter school Alternative Education Campuses (AECs) leverage the nimbleness of the charter school model to create unique learning opportunities nationwide for students who experience challenges that make it difficult to excel academically. Some of the challenges include homelessness, pregnancy, parenting while in school, or interaction with the…

Over the past decade, national initiatives have shifted States' attention to the challenge of turning around low-performing schools. The lack of consistent, dramatic improvements in the lowest-performing schools reflects the severity of the school turnaround challenge, but also suggests the need to continuously evaluate and refine turnaround…

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…

This annual report provides a review of Colorado Children's Campaign's accomplishments in 2010. The report is comprised of the following sections: (1) Letter from President and CEO; (2) About Us: 2010 in Review; (3) Child Health; (4) Early Childhood Development; (5) K-12 Education; (6) Fiscal Policy and Budget Analysis; (7) 2010 Legislative…

Dropouts from rural school districts have not received the same scrutiny as given to those from urban ones. The reasons behind this lack of knowledge about the experience of rural school districts with dropouts are unclear. The purpose of the present study was to begin to close this knowledge gap. A first major study of rural dropouts in the…

Graduation rates are a fundamental indicator of whether or not the nation's public school system is doing what it is intended to do: enroll, engage, and educate youth to be productive members of society. Since almost 90 percent of the fastest-growing and highest-paying jobs require some postsecondary education, having a high school diploma and the…

According to the 2000 census, high school dropouts had a 52% employment rate, compared to 71% for high school graduates and 83% for college graduates. According to NCSE, the national dropout rate is 30% of which 80% had been chronically absent from school ("School attendance tracking: Challenges and effective practices"), which puts the…

This publication provides descriptive information about the 100 largest school districts in the United States. Almost one in every four public school students in this nation is served by one of these large districts. They are distinguished from the average district by characteristics, in addition to sheer size, such as pupil-teacher ratios, high…