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
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
This is the fourth year that Lumina Foundation has released a report on progress toward the goal that 60 percent of Americans obtain a high-quality postsecondary degree or credential by 2025 -- an objective called Goal 2025. In these now-annual reports, the foundation sets the metric for measuring progress as the higher education attainment rate -- the percentage of the nation's adult, working-age population holding a two- or four-year college degree.
This year, the report covers data for 2011 -- the most recent year for which data are available. In 2011, the percentage of Americans between the ages of 25 and 64 with a two- or four-year college degree was 38.7 percent. This is an increase from last year's report; in 2010, the attainment rate was 38.3 percent. Overall, the U.S. attainment rate has been increasing slowly but steadily; in 2008, it was 37.9 percent, and in 2009 it was 38.1 percent.
The higher education attainment rate of young adults (ages 25-34) is a good leading indicator of where higher education attainment rates are headed. In 2011, the rate was 40.1 percent -- almost one-and-a-half percentage points higher than that among all adults, and two-and-a-half percentage points higher than in 2008. Lumina's attainment goal has always included high value postsecondary certificates, but data on the number of adults holding certificates is not readily available.
This year, however, the first solid estimates of the number of high-value postsecondary certificates have been produced. They suggest that an additional 5 percent of the U.S. adult population between the ages of 25 and 64 hold a postsecondary certificate with significant economic value.The recent increase in attainment rates -- especially among young adults -- is a step in the right direction, but there is much more to do to reach Goal 2025
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States
The analysis here focuses on Boston's charter high schools. For the purpose of this report, an analysis of high schools is both a necessity and a virtue. It is necessary to study high schools because most students applying to charters in earlier grades are not yet old enough to generate data on postsecondary outcomes. Charter high schools are also of substantial policy interest: a growing body of research argues that high school may be too late for cost-effective human capital interventions. Indeed, impact analyses of interventions for urban youth have mostly generated disappointing results.
This report is interested in ascertaining whether charter schools, which in Massachusetts are largely budget-neutral, can have a substantial impact on the life course of affected students. The set of schools studied here comes from an earlier investigation of the effects of charter attendance in Boston on test scores.
The high schools from the earlier study, which enroll the bulk of charter high school students in Boston, generate statistically and socially significant gains on state assessments in the 10th grade. This report questions whether these gains are sustained.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States (Northeastern) / Massachusetts / Suffolk County / Boston
To help inform policymakers and the public about the progress of education in the United States, Congress has mandated that the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) produce an annual report, "The Condition of Education." This year's report presents 42 indicators of important developments and trends in U.S. education. These indicators focus on population characteristics, participation in education, elementary and secondary education, and postsecondary education.
As this year's Condition shows, in 2012, about 90 percent of young adults ages 25 to 29 had a high school diploma, or its equivalent, and 33 percent had a bachelor's degree or higher. As in previous years, annual median earnings in 2011 were higher for those with higher levels of education -- for example, 25- to 34-year-olds with a college degree earned over twice as much as high school dropouts.
In 2011, almost two-thirds of 3- to 5-year-olds were enrolled in preschool, and nearly 60 percent of these children were in full-day programs. At the elementary and secondary level, there were about 50 million public school students in 2011, a number that is expected to grow to 53 million in the next decade. Of these students, nearly 2 million attended charter schools. Postsecondary enrollment in 2011 was at 21 million students, including 18 million undergraduate and 3 million graduate students.
NCES's newest data on elementary and secondary schools show that about one in five public schools was considered high poverty in 2011 -- meaning that 75 percent or more of their enrolled students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch -- up from about to one in eight in 2000. In school year 2009 -- 10, some 3.1 million public high school students, or 78.2 percent, graduated on time with a regular diploma. And, in 2011, about 68 percent of recent high school completers were enrolled in college the following fall. Meanwhile, the status dropout rate, or the percentage of 16- to 24-year-olds who are not enrolled in school and do not have a high school diploma or its equivalent, declined from 12 percent in 1990 to 7 percent in 2011.
At 4-year colleges in 2011, nearly 90 percent of full-time students at public and private nonprofit institutions were under the age of 25. However, only about 29 percent of full-time students at private for-profit colleges were, while 39 percent were between the ages of 25 to 34 and another 32 percent were 35 and older. About 56 percent of male students and 61 percent of female students who began their bachelor's degree in the fall of 2005, and did not transfer, had completed their degree by 2011. In that year, there were 1.7 million bachelor's degrees and over 700,000 master's degrees awarded.
The Condition of Education 2013 includes the latest data available on these and more key indicators. As new data are released, the indicators will be updated and made available. Along with these indicators, NCES produces a wide range of reports and data to help inform policymakers and the American public about trends and conditions in U.S. education.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States
Education and Literacy;International Development
Effective, evidence-based policies on post-primary education are of vital importance as many developing countries start to the see a bulge in secondary and postsecondary enrollment, the product of the achievement of near-universal access to primary school. Finding ways to deliver and promote access to high-quality post-primary education, and to ensure that education is relevant to labor market needs, is one of the great challenges of our times. This must be accomplished in countries where governments face severe budget constraints and many, of not most, parents are too poor to cover the costs out of pocket.
International reports such as "A Global Compact on Learning", by the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, emphasize providing opportunities for post-primary education as a first-tier policy challenge. In addition, there has been considerably less progress in gender parity at the secondary level. Meeting these challenges will require a combination of using existing resources more effectively -- which requires both understanding which inputs are key and which are not -- and a range of innovations that may fundamentally alter the current methods of instruction.
To that end, the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) has launched a Post-Primary Education Initiative intended to promote policy-relevant research on secondary and post-secondary education in developing countries, which together will be referred to as post-primary education. This paper is a first step in that process. It reviews the evidence to date on post-primary education and highlight the gaps in the literature, with a focus on identifying policies that should be given the highest priority for future research
Different countries define primary and secondary schooling differently, and in many countries students attend middle schools, upper primary schools, or junior secondary schools before attending secondary school. For the purpose of this review, "post-primary education" includes everything from upper primary, middle, or junior secondary school through tertiary education, as defined by the local context in different countries, including vocational school and other alternative tracks for this age group. In practice, this means that in the research reviewed, the majority of children are in 5th grade (i.e. 10-11 years old) and older.
The review is organized as follows. Section II provides some background on postprimary education in the developing world. Section III explains how papers were selected for this review. Section IV presents a conceptual framework for thinking about postprimary education (PPE), including a brief discussion of measuring outcomes. Section V reviews the evidence pertaining to the demand for schooling (the impact of policies that attempt to increase the willingness of households to send their children to school), and Section VI reviews the evidence on the supply of schooling (the impact of policies that change school and teacher characteristics, and more generally how schools are organized). A final section summarizes the findings, highlighting several research gaps that should receive high priority in future research.
August 1970
Geographic Focus:
Dual enrollment in high school is viewed by many as one mechanism for increasing college admission and completion of low-income students. However, little evidence demonstrates that these students discretely benefit from dual enrollment and whether these programs narrow attainment gaps vis-à-vis students from middle-class or affluent family backgrounds. Using the National Education Longitudinal Study (N = 8,800), this study finds significant benefits in boosting rates of college degree attainment for low-income students while holding weaker effects for peers from more affluent backgrounds. These results remain even with analyses from newer data of college freshman of 2004. This report conducts sensitivity analyses and found that these results are robust to relatively large unobserved confounders. However, expanding dual enrollment programs would modestly reduce gaps in degree attainment.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States
Minnesota public education -- from preschool to college and everything in between -- is poised for a breakthrough. Education requires fundamental and systemic change to meet the needs of an increasingly competitive and global workforce, and growing diverse populations. This is the case particularly for Minnesota where great schools can prepare all kids for thriving futures.
This poll captures the opinions of over 400 teachers and hopes to bring about change that will eliminate the current situation of nation-trailing achievement gaps and high school graduation rates.
Building off of the success of MinnCAN's 2012 statewide public opinion poll, where 1,000 Minnesotans were interviewed on public education, this report takes a similar approach to dig deeper with district school teachers through a 28-question poll. The topics discussed were: effective teaching, educator evaluations, professional development and school staffing decisions.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States (Midwestern) / Minnesota
