Children and Youth, Education and Literacy
This brief presents preliminary findings from an exploratory study of New York City students' transitions into, through, and out of the middle grades. Our analysis reveals that students' attendance and achievement in their early schooling (fourth grade) predict whether students are likely to graduate from high school many years later. Further, we find that many students begin the middle grades on-track to graduate high school but fall off this trajectory before the end of eighth grade. These findings suggest that teachers and administrators should pay close attention to students whose attendance and math achievement fall during the middle grades, as these students are particularly at risk for not graduating from high school on time.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America-United States (New York Metropolitan Area)
Children and Youth;Education and Literacy;Employment and Labor
This report presents findings from the first of three components of a mixed-methods study of middle school teacher turnover in New York City. The project is a collaboration between researchers at The Research Alliance for New York City Schools, New York University, Teachers College, and Baruch College. This study reveals that 55% of the teachers who entered middle schools between 2002 and 2009 left these schools within three years. Further, nearly 60% of departing middle school teachers left the New York City public school system altogether and another 23% either moved to schools that did not include the middle grades (Grades 6-8) or took on non-teaching positions. These findings suggest an exodus of newly-arrived teachers from middle schools, and they raise questions for future research about the causes, consequences, and implications of teacher turnover. The remaining two components of the Research Alliance's larger study -- a survey and a case study analysis -- will investigate these and other questions.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States (New York Metropolitan Area)
Educators have long asserted that the middle grade years (typically, grades six through eight) are a time of both great importance and vulnerability in students' K-12 schooling. Anecdotal and empirical evidence suggest that students encounter new social and emotional challenges, increased academic demands, and major developmental transitions during the middle grade years. In this study, we investigate whether and how students' achievement and attendance change between grade four and eight and identified moments during this period when students' achievement and attendance suggest that they will struggle to graduate from high school within four years.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America-United States (Northeastern)-New York-New York County-New York City
This report contributes to the discussion of charter schools by providing evidence for charter students' performance in Massachusetts for six years of schooling, beginning with the 2005-2006 school year and concluding in 2010-2011.
With the cooperation of the Massachusetts Department of Education, CREDO obtained the historical sets of student-level administrative records. The support of Massachusetts DOE staff was critical to CREDO's understanding of the character and quality of the data received. However, it bears mention that the entirety of interactions with the Department dealt with technical issues related to the data. CREDO has developed the findings and conclusions independently.
This report provides an in-depth examination of the results for charter schools in Massachusetts. It is also an update to CREDO's first analysis of the performance of Massachusetts's charter schools, which can be found on the organization's website.
This report has three main benefits. First, it provides an updated rigorous and independent view of the performance of the state's charter schools. Second, the study design is consistent with CREDO's reports on charter school performance in other locations, making the results amenable to being benchmarked against those nationally and in other states. Third, the study includes a section on charter performance in the Boston area, where much attention has focused.
The analysis presented here takes two forms. We first present the findings about the effects of charter schools on student academic performance. These results are expressed in terms of the academic progress that a typical student in Massachusetts would realize from a year of enrollment in a charter school. The second set of findings is presented at the school level. Because schools are the instruments on which the legislation and public policy works, it is important to understand the range of performance for the schools. These findings look at the performance of students by school and present school average results.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States (Northeastern) / Massachusetts
Education and Literacy, Employment and Labor
This report explores the conditions under which middle-school teachers in New York City leave their schools, and the consequences of this turnover. The focus on middle schools stems from the widely-held view that the middle grades are a critical turning point in the lives of children, and that many New York City school children lose academic momentum in these grades, setting them on trajectories of failure as they move towards high school and life beyond it. This report is based on a survey of more than 4,000 full-time middle school teachers working in 125 of the nearly 200 middle schools in New York City serving children in grades six through eight in the 2009-10 school year. The participating teachers reported whether they had considered leaving their current school or leaving teaching during that school year, and the reasons that they considered leaving. The report links their responses to teachers' reports about their own backgrounds and experiences, to the demographic characteristics of the schools in which they teach, and to the collective perceptions of all of the teachers in a school about that school as a workplace. This report is part of a three-year, mixed-methods study of teacher turnover in New York City middle schools.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America-United States (Northeastern)-New York-New York County-New York City
The 17th edition of Education Week 's Quality Counts continues the report's tradition of tracking key education indicators and grading the states on their policy efforts and outcomes. Each year, Quality Counts provides new results for a portion of the policy-and-performance categories that form the framework for the report's State-of-the-States analysis. The 2013 edition presents updated scores and letter grades, for the states and the nation as a whole, in three of the six major areas.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America-United States
Education and Literacy;Race and Ethnicity
Part of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's Breaking Barriers series, the report shows how states, districts, and schools systematically deny opportunity for black males through policies and practices regarding curriculum offerings, teacher preparation and compensation, discipline, and special education. The report issues a call for action and legal justification for Public Reciprocity in Education for Postsecondary Success (PREPS).
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States
In the coming years, states will need to make the most significant changes to their assessment systems in a decade as they implement the Common Core State Standards, a common framework for what students are expected to know that will replace existing standards in 45 states and the District of Columbia. The Common Core effort has prompted concerns about the cost of implementing the new standards and assessments, but there is little comprehensive up-to-date information on the costs of assessment systems currently in place throughout the country.
This report fills this void by providing the most current, comprehensive evidence on state-level costs of assessment systems, based on new data from state contracts with testing vendors assembled by the Brown Center on Education Policy. These data cover a combined $669 million in annual spending on assessments in 45 states.
The report identifies state collaboration on assessments as a clear strategy for achieving cost savings without compromising test quality. For example, a state with 100,000 students that joins a consortium of states containing one million students is predicted to save 37 percent, or $1.4 million per year; a state of 500,000 students saves an estimated 25 percent, or $3.9 million, by joining the same consortium.
Collaborating to form assessment consortia is the strategy being pursued by nearly all of the states that have adopted the Common Core standards. But it is not yet clear how these common assessments will be sustained after federal funding for their development ends in 2014, months before the tests are fully implemented. The report identifies a lack of transparency in assessment pricing as a barrier to states making informed decisions regarding their testing systems, and recommends that consortia of states use their market power to encourage test-makers to divulge more details about their pricing models.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America-United States
