Federal requirements stipulate that states and local education agencies annually calculate and report an Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate, disaggregated by student group. The ACGR includes all students who graduate from high school in four years with a regular high school diploma, plus all students with the most significant cognitive disabilities…

Due to extensive research, we now know that in spite of extraordinary success in expanding access to American higher education over the last 60 years, far too little has been done to ensure that students complete college, even when they take 50 percent more time to complete the degree than full-time attendance should require. Obstacles to success…

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…

With the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), state education agencies (SEAs) and local educational agencies (LEAs) have stepped up activities to broadly expand their data collection and reporting systems. The Data Quality Campaign (DQC) has advocated strongly for states to build robust student-level longitudinal data systems based on…