There is growing interest in leveraging Title IV student aid to improve college completion. Advocates have proposed linking funding in the Pell and Campus-Based Programs to measures of college performance. However, to do so in an equitable and efficient manner, raw measures of college output, such as rates of graduation and academic progress, must…

With the release of Ohio's state test score data each August, one recurring question is how well have the state's large sector of charter schools performed relative to their counterparts in traditional districts? The Thomas B. Fordham Institute commissioned Public Impact to conduct an analysis of the 2009-10 data in this report. Using public…

Early colleges are one alternative to the traditional comprehensive high school. This article examines whether early college students are academically, socially and emotionally ready for university work at age 16. Preliminary data indicate enough promise in the innovation to revision not only the high school curriculum, but middle school and…

The 12 winners of the federal Race to the Top competition have experienced near-universal challenges in turning their sweeping, multifaceted proposals into reality, among them a limited state capacity to execute fast, dramatic change and deeply rooted teacher-evaluation systems that have proved hard to transform. Reports unveiled by the U.S.…

In conjunction with the Denver Plan instituted in 2005, Denver Public Schools (DPS) has embarked upon a consistent strategy of opening new schools in an effort to improve overall academic performance. DPS has pursued this strategy under several different paths: an annual request for proposals from charter school applicants; allowing current…

This longitudinal case study examines 10 years' worth of annual monitoring reports for two rural Native American Charter Schools. Using data from multiple sources including interviews, site visits, and document analyses, the authors used provisional coding and constant comparison analysis to categorize the accolades and recommendations embedded in…

Curriculum-based measurement of oral reading (CBM-R) is frequently used to set student goals and monitor student progress. This study examined the quality of growth estimates derived from CBM-R progress monitoring data. The authors used a linear mixed effects regression (LMER) model to simulate progress monitoring data for multiple levels of…

A high school principal and faculty celebrated after hearing that their students in each of the quartiles had improved in both reading and mathematics on the state accountability assessment. Because of the percent of increases in achievement levels on the test, the Florida Department of Education awarded the school an A for 2011. Shortly…

This study investigates the effectiveness of the Ohio High School Transformation Initiative using several years of state data on attendance, graduation, dropout rates, and performance index scores. Results indicate differences between small schools or small learning communities, and traditional schools that have similar school profiles to small…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to measure and compare the performance of Portuguese secondary schools. Design/methodology/approach: Some data on the schools were collected via an electronic questionnaire sent to 103 secondary schools of the centre region of Portugal; other needed data were available through the Centre Regional Education…

Just as it has every June since 2006, the U.S. Department of Education last month delivered a rating to each state and territory based on the performance of its special education programs. The ratings, intended to fulfill the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act's requirement that "measurable" and "rigorous" targets be…

This study is the Thomas B. Fordham Institute's first review of the quality of state U.S. history standards since 2003. Key findings include: (1) A majority of states' standards are mediocre-to-awful. The average grade across "all" states is barely a D. In twenty-eight jurisdictions--a majority of states--the history standards earn Ds or…

While policymakers and researchers alike have focused on improving students' transition into high school, a new study of Florida schools suggests the critical transition problem may happen years before, when students enter middle school. The study, part of the Program on Education Policy and Governance Working Papers Series at Harvard University,…

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) targeted substantial School Improvement Grants (SIGs) to the nation's "persistently lowest achieving" public schools (i.e., up to $2 million per school annually over 3 years) but required schools accepting these awards to implement a federally prescribed school-reform model.…

Redistributing highly effective teachers from low- to high-need schools is an education policy tool that is at the center of several major current policy initiatives. The underlying assumption is that teacher productivity is portable across different schools settings. Using elementary and secondary school data from North Carolina and Florida, this…