In 1988, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) developed a private school data collection that improved on the sporadic collection of private school data dating back to 1890 bydeveloping an alternative to commercially available private school sampling frames. Since 1989, the U.S. Bureau of the Census has conducted the biennial Private School Universe Survey (PSS) for NCES. The PSS is designed to generate biennial data on the total number of private schools, students, and teachers, and to build a universe of private schools to serve as a sampling frame of private schools for NCES sample surveys. For more information about the methodology and design of the PSS, please see the Technical Notes in appendix B of this report.
The target population for the PSS is all schools in the 50 states and the District of Columbia that are not supported primarily by public funds, provide classroom instruction for one or more of grades kindergarten through 12 (or comparable ungraded levels), and have one or more teachers. Organizations or institutions that provide support for home schooling, but do not provide classroom instruction, are not included.
The 2011 -- 12 PSS data were collected between September 2011 and May 2012. All data are for the 2011 -- 12 school year except the high school graduate data, which are for the 2010 -- 11 school year.Because the purpose of this report is to introduce new NCES survey data through the presentation of tables containing descriptive information, only selected findings are listed below. These findings are purely descriptive in nature and are not meant to imply causality. These findings have been chosen to demonstrate the range of information available from the 2011 -- 12 PSS rather than to discuss all of the observed differences, emphasize any particular issue, or make comparisons over time.
The tables in this report contain counts and percentages demonstrating bivariate relationships. All of the results have been weighted to reflect the sample design and to account for nonresponse and other adjustments. Comparisons drawn in the selected findings have been tested for statistical significance at the .05 level using Student's t statistics to ensure that the differences are larger than those that might be expected due to sampling variation. No adjustments were made for multiple comparisons.
Many of the variables examined are related to one another, and complex interactions and relationships have not been explored. Statistical Analysis Software (SAS 9.2) and SUDAAN (10.0) were used to compute the statistics for this report.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America-United States
Education and Literacy;Men;Race and Ethnicity
Moving the Needle addresses the challenges, opportunities, and potential solutions to increasing college readiness rates for young men of color in New York City. The report describes indicators that help predict college readiness, environmental factors that affect educational outcomes, and how this research can inform the City's Expanded Success Initiative.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States (Northeastern) / New York / New York County / New York City
The research on academic mindsets shows significant promise for addressing important problems facing educators. However, the history of educational reform is replete with good ideas for improvement that fail to realize the promises that accompany their introduction. As a field, we are quick to implement new ideas but slow to learn how to execute well on them. If we continue to implement reform as we always have, we will continue to get what we have always gotten.
Accelerating the field's capacity to learn in and through practice to improve is one key to transforming the good ideas discussed at the White House meeting into tools, interventions, and professional development initiatives that achieve effectiveness reliably at scale. Toward this end, this paper discusses the function of networked communities engaged in improvement research and illustrates the application of these ideas in promoting greater student success in community colleges. Specifically, this white paper:
* Introduces improvement research and networked communities as ideas that we believe can enhance educators' capacities to advance positive change.
* Explains why improvement research requires a different kind of measures -- what we call practical measurement -- that are distinct from those commonly used by schools for accountability or by researchers for theory development.
* Illustrates through a case study how systematic improvement work to promote student mindsets can be carried out. The case is based on the Carnegie Foundation's effort to address the poor success rates for students in developmental math at community colleges.
Specifically, this case details:
- How a practical theory and set of practical measures were created to assess the causes of "productive persistence" -- the set of "non-cognitive factors" thought to powerfully affect community college student success. In doing this work, a broad set of potential factors was distilled into a digestible framework that was useful topractitioners working with researchers, and a large set of potential measures was reduced to a practical (3-minute) set of assessments.
- How these measures were used by researchers and practitioners for practical purposes -- specifically, to assess changes, predict which students were at-risk for course failure, and set priorities for improvement work.
-How we organized researchersto work with practitioners to accelerate field-based experimentation on everyday practices that promote academic mindsets(what we call alpha labs), and how we organized practitioners to work with researchers to test, revise, refine, and iteratively improve their everyday practices (using plando-study-act cycles).
While significant progress has already occurred, robust, practical, reliable efforts to improve students' mindsets remains at an early formative stage. We hope the ideas presented here are an instructive starting point for new efforts that might attempt to address other problems facing educators, most notably issues of inequality and underperformance in K-12 settings.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States
Since the 1970s, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has monitored the academic performance of 9-, 13-, and 17-year-old students with what have become known as the long-term trend assessments. Four decades of results ofer an extended view of student achievement in reading and mathematics. Results in this report are based on the most recent performance of more than 50,000 public and private school students who, by their participation, have contributed to our understanding of the nation's academic achievement.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America-United States
Low-income adult learners often struggle to finance their college expenses, having to contend with competing responsibilities involving work, family, and school. This report presents findings from a study of performance-based scholarships at two community colleges in New York City -- the Borough of Manhattan Community College and Hostos Community College, both part of the City University of New York system. Students who were eligible for the program could receive up to $2,600 total over two semesters, or up to $3,900 total over two semesters plus a summer semester. Payments were contingent upon maintaining a minimum level of enrollment and grades, and were made directly to students.
The program in New York City is one of six being studied as part of the Performance-Based Scholarship (PBS) Demonstration. Each program is designed to serve a different target population and to test an alternative incentive structure, and all employ a random assignment research design.
The program in New York City is a test of a scholarship-only program, with no services attached to the award. It targets adult students who are in need of developmental education, and aims to learn whether these scholarships are an effective way to help students progress academically. In addition, the program's design allows researchers to test whether offering students a summer scholarship as well can further improve their academic outcomes. Analysis suggests that the scholarship-only program:
* Encouraged more full-time enrollment during the semesters in which the program operated. Full-time enrollment increased 4.1 percentage points in the first semester and 6.0 percentage points in the second semester of the scholarship program.
* Did not increase the average number of semesters registered or credits earned over two years. While students who were eligible for the scholarship attempted more credits on average, this impact was small and was not accompanied by impacts on the number of semesters registered or cumulative credits earned.
* Increased registration and credit accumulation in the summer semester. However, this increase did not lead to increased registration or credit accumulation over the two-year followup period.
* Had impacts on students at one college but not on students at the other college. There is exploratory evidence that the program at one of the colleges had positive impacts on key academic outcomes. The analyses suggest that the impacts varied by college and that the college environments may have influenced these impacts.
MDRC will continue to publish findings from each of the six programs in the PBS Demonstration in the coming years. The program in New York makes an important contribution to the overall demonstration and to the study of performance-based scholarships.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States (Northeastern) / New York / New York County / New York City
Low-income adult learners often struggle to finance their college expenses, having to contend with competing responsibilities involving work, family, and school. This report presents findings from a study of performance-based scholarships at two community colleges in New York City -- the Borough of Manhattan Community College and Hostos Community College, both part of the City University of New York system. Students who were eligible for the program could receive up to $2,600 total over two semesters, or up to $3,900 total over two semesters plus a summer semester. Payments were contingent upon maintaining a minimum level of enrollment and grades, and were made directly to students.
The program in New York City is one of six being studied as part of the Performance-Based Scholarship (PBS) Demonstration. Each program is designed to serve a different target population and to test an alternative incentive structure, and all employ a random assignment research design.
The program in New York City is a test of a scholarship-only program, with no services attached to the award. It targets adult students who are in need of developmental education, and aims to learn whether these scholarships are an effective way to help students progress academically. In addition, the program's design allows researchers to test whether offering students a summer scholarship as well can further improve their academic outcomes. Analysis suggests that the scholarship-only program:
* Encouraged more full-time enrollment during the semesters in which the program operated. Full-time enrollment increased 4.1 percentage points in the first semester and 6.0 percentage points in the second semester of the scholarship program.
* Did not increase the average number of semesters registered or credits earned over two years. While students who were eligible for the scholarship attempted more credits on average, this impact was small and was not accompanied by impacts on the number of semesters registered or cumulative credits earned.
* Increased registration and credit accumulation in the summer semester. However, this increase did not lead to increased registration or credit accumulation over the two-year followup period.
* Had impacts on students at one college but not on students at the other college. There is exploratory evidence that the program at one of the colleges had positive impacts on key academic outcomes. The analyses suggest that the impacts varied by college and that the college environments may have influenced these impacts.
MDRC will continue to publish findings from each of the six programs in the PBS Demonstration in the coming years. The program in New York makes an important contribution to the overall demonstration and to the study of performance-based scholarships.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States (Northeastern) / New York / New York County / New York City
Education and Literacy;Employment and Labor
This first report of an ongoing evaluation of The Wallace Foundation's Principal Pipeline Initiative describes the six participating school districts' plans and activities during the first year of their grants. The evaluation, conducted by Policy Studies Associates and the RAND Corporation, isintended to inform policy makers and practitioners about the process of carrying out new policies and practices for school leadership and about the results of investments in the Principal Pipeline Initiative. This report is based on collection and analysis of qualitative data, including the districts' proposals, work plans, and progress reports and semi-structured interviews in spring 2012 with 91 administrators employed by districts and their partner institutions. Leaders in all districts report wanting to enlarge their pools of strong applicants for principal positions and to identify and cultivate leadership talent as early as possible in educators' careers.
Districts are actively working on allrequired pipeline components: (1) with stakeholder participation, they have developed standards and identified competencies for principals, which they plan to use to guide principal training, hiring, evaluation, and support; (2) they are initiating or strengthening partnerships with university training programs; (3) for hiring, they have standard performance tasks and are developing systems to capture data on candidates' experience; (4) they have diagnostic evaluation tools and are working to build the capacity of principals' supervisors and mentors to support principals' skill development. In addition, all are also bolstering district-run training programs for graduates of university training programs who aspire to become principals.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States
Education and Literacy;Employment and Labor
This first report of an ongoing evaluation of The Wallace Foundation's Principal Pipeline Initiative describes the six participating school districts' plans and activities during the first year of their grants. The evaluation, conducted by Policy Studies Associates and the RAND Corporation, isintended to inform policy makers and practitioners about the process of carrying out new policies and practices for school leadership and about the results of investments in the Principal Pipeline Initiative. This report is based on collection and analysis of qualitative data, including the districts' proposals, work plans, and progress reports and semi-structured interviews in spring 2012 with 91 administrators employed by districts and their partner institutions. Leaders in all districts report wanting to enlarge their pools of strong applicants for principal positions and to identify and cultivate leadership talent as early as possible in educators' careers.
Districts are actively working on allrequired pipeline components: (1) with stakeholder participation, they have developed standards and identified competencies for principals, which they plan to use to guide principal training, hiring, evaluation, and support; (2) they are initiating or strengthening partnerships with university training programs; (3) for hiring, they have standard performance tasks and are developing systems to capture data on candidates' experience; (4) they have diagnostic evaluation tools and are working to build the capacity of principals' supervisors and mentors to support principals' skill development. In addition, all are also bolstering district-run training programs for graduates of university training programs who aspire to become principals.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States
