In August, the Manhattan Institute (MI) contracted with Rasmussen Reports to survey public opinion in five states about school choice policies generally, as well as charter schools specifically. Working with MI, Rasmussen crafted nine questions that were added to the organization's regular polling of likely voters for presidential and senatorial…

Historically, Pennsylvania has struggled to integrate its public schools, especially with much of the racial diversity concentrated in urban regions. Starting in the 1960s, the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission (PHRC) was the state's enforcing body to combat school desegregation, but since the early 1980s, when it comes to education, the…

This report provides educators and policymakers with information they can use to celebrate their successes, understand their unique challenges, and set meaningful goals to increase opportunity for all students. It is important to note that while AP® Exams are valid measures of students' content mastery of college-level studies in specific academic…

National and regional trends mask important variation among states in the supply of high school graduates. This profile provides brief indicators for Pennsylvania related to: current levels of educational attainment, projections of high school graduates into the future, and two common barriers to student access and success--insufficient academic…

In this study, the authors examined the academic performance of 18 urban districts that participated in the 2009 Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) of the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). The districts participated in grade 4 and grade 8 reading and mathematics assessments. Eleven of these districts also participated in the…

Every fall, eighth graders participate in the School District of Philadelphia's high school application and admissions process, vying for spots in a tiered system of public high schools across the city. This policy brief looks at disparities in the students who are successful in exercising school "choice" in the District's high school…

Despite the proliferation of data about student performance, secondary school educators have had difficulty accessing data on their former students' post-high school employment and earnings in the formal economy. This article describes how one community used state unemployment insurance data, merged with student record data, to investigate the…

This report summarizes preliminary and exploratory research conducted by the Council of the Great City Schools and the American Institutes for Research on urban school systems participating in the Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The study is one of the first large-scale analyses…

The 7th edition of this publication provides updated projections of high school graduates for each year and each state (plus the District of Columbia) through 2022. The profile breaks down the projections by major racial and ethnic groups: (1) American Indian/Alaska Native; (2) Asian/Pacific Islander; (3) Black, non-Hispanic; (4) Hispanic; and (5)…

This report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) presents results from the Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) in mathematics. Representative samples of between 1,800 and 4,300 fourth- and eighth-grade public school students from 18 urban districts participated in the 2009 assessment. Eleven of the districts also…

The first U.S. charter school opened in 1992, and the scale of the charter movement has since grown to 4,000 schools and more than a million students in 40 states plus the District of Columbia. With this growth has also come a contentious debate about the effects of the schools on their own students and on students in nearby traditional public…

This document summarizes droputs, transfers, and failures from the class of 1990 in Pennsylvania public schools. The total enrollment for Pennsylvania public schools in 1986-87 was 139,761, in 1987-88 was 133,449, in 1988-89 was 123,717, and in 1989-90 was 115,400. Over 40% of Black and Hispanic students who were in regular ninth-grade classes in…

This report uses a unique set of data obtained from the Kids Integrated Data System (KIDS), which is housed at the University of Pennsylvania's Cartographic Modeling Laboratory. The KIDS system merges individual-level data on young people from the School District of Philadelphia and the city's social service agencies, including the Department of…

On July 28, 2006, a panel of experts briefed members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on the putative benefits of racial and ethnic diversity in elementary and secondary education. Four experts presented written statements to the Commissioners that assessed the social science literature on this issue. They also addressed whether or not…