Search

We estimate school-choice preferences revealed by the rank-ordered lists submitted by more than 22,000 applicants to a citywide lottery for more than 200 traditional and charter public schools in Washington, DC. The results confirm previously reported findings that commuting distance, school demographics, and academic indicators play important roles in school choice, and that there is considerable heterogeneity of preferences. Simulations suggest segregation by race and income would be reduced and enrollment in high-performing schools increased if policymakers were to expand school choice by relaxing school capacity constraints in individual campuses. The simulations also suggest that closing the lowest-performing schools could further reduce segregation and increase enrollment in high-performing schools. The following are appended: (1) Findings on Neighborhood and Other Non-Academic Characteristics; (2) Detailed Analysis of Endogeneity and Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives; and (3) Supplemental Tables and Figures. [For "Market Signals: How Do DC Parents Rank Schools, and What Does It Mean for Policy? Policy Brief," see ED568708.]

This report presents the underlying theory and methodology of the first framework to operationalize culture and culturally responsiveness in the context of Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports. Created following a systematic review of literature, this framework was created as a cultural artifact to expand the conceptualization of the role of culture in the implementation of PBIS and other education programs. The author hopes the framework will start a movement to address the systemic contradictions that researchers and practitioners in the field experience regarding racial disparities in behavioral and academic opportunities and outcomes and the locally meaningful implementation of PBIS and other top-to-bottom initiatives and programs (e.g., Response to Intervention [RTI]).

The COVID-19 pandemic drew new attention to the role of school boards in the U.S. In this paper, we examine school districts' choices of learning modality--whether and when to offer in-person, virtual, or hybrid instruction--over the course of the 2020-21 pandemic school year. The analysis takes advantage of granular weekly data on learning mode and COVID-19 cases for Ohio school districts. We show that districts respond on the margin to health risks: all else equal, a marginal increase in new cases reduces the probability that a district offers in-person instruction the next week. Moreover, this negative response is magnified when the district was in-person the prior week and attenuates in magnitude over the school year. These findings are consistent with districts learning from experience about the effect of in-person learning on disease transmission in schools. We also find evidence that districts are influenced by the decisions of their peers.

Initiatives to increase leadership accountability coupled with efforts to promote data-driven leadership have led to widespread adoption of instruments to assess school leaders. In this paper we present a decision matrix that practitioners and researchers can use to facilitate instrument selection. Our decision matrix focuses on the psychometric properties of the instrument; the model of leadership used to construct the instrument; the feasibility of implementation; and the extent to which feedback lends itself to changes in behavior (actionability). We apply this decision matrix to two of the most prominent leadership feedback instruments, CALL and VAL-ED. We find substantial similarities between the instruments, yet each has unique strengths and drawbacks. We discuss the implications of the comparative strengths and drawbacks of the two instruments and how they might be most effectively deployed to improve leadership practices.

Scholars have developed a wide range of theories to explain both stability and change in policy subsystems. In recent years, a burgeoning literature has emerged that focuses on the application of network analysis in policy research, more formally known as Policy Network Analysis (PNA). This approach, while still developing, has great potential as an integrated theoretical framework that brings together multiple theories under a single conceptual paradigm. In this paper, the authors demonstrate how the insights of three other established policy theories--namely, the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), Punctuated-Equilibrium theory (PET), and the Policy Entrepreneur Model (PEM)--may be augmented under a synthesis theory of policy networks to provide a more conceptually coherent theory of policymaking that may be useful for explaining periods of both stability and change.

Teacher and student sorting within and between schools has historically garnered national attention and controversy. Scholars have recently examined how school leaders make data-driven decisions to create more equitable schools, particularly through teacher and student assignment practices. School leaders use student test scores to strategically sort students into classes to create "balance." Student achievement data is also linked to teacher reassignment, in which ineffective teachers are strategically reassigned to non-tested grades or subjects, while effective teachers may be promoted to leadership positions. Scholars have found that a combination of data-driven strategic staffing, accountability pressures, and micro-politics are prime drivers of assignment strategies within schools. Within the literature on assignment practices, one strand examines the impact of assignment practices on students but does not engage with principals' decision-making strategies despite the central role principals play in school decisions. The second strand of research delves deeply into leadership decision making but seldom provides data on the actual assignment practices. This includes observed data regarding the two types of assignment strategies dominant within the literature: privilege- and learning-centric. A learning-centric assignment is the placement of highly knowledgeable teachers with students who need effective teachers more than do other peers (Donaldson, 2011, In contrast, privilege-centric assignments place experienced teachers in classrooms with higher achieving students. School leaders may also use privilege-centric staffing to appease affluent parents and increase retention of their more experienced teachers. Although privilege-centric assignments may be counterproductive to the student experience, many schools employ this strategy despite principals' reports of using data to increase school equitability. The assignment of teachers to students and classes is presumed to be an entirely local (school-level) decision, with school leaders having substantial authority over this process. The findings of the preceding research underscore the importance of principals in this process, and yet we know little about the ability of leadership to interrupt systems of privilege and institute more equitable staffing arrangements. Because of this potential inconsistency between principals reporting that they make data-driven decisions and their actual assignment practices, we see the need for continued research in this area. The purpose of this study is to fill this gap within the literature by first examining the relationship between principals' reported data-driven decisions and teacher and student assignment strategies within schools, and then looking at the relationship between assignment practices and student learning. This study couples survey data from 213 Florida elementary and middle schools with 8 years of longitudinal, statewide data to address the following questions: (1) To what extent are privilege- and learning-centric assignment practices used within schools? Are these practices changing over time?; (2) How do privilege- and learning-centric assignments impact student-learning gains?; (3) What drives student-assignment practices--is this phenomenon embedded in the culture of a school or do principals dictate assignment practices?; and (4) How are principals' reported uses of data related to observed privilege- and learning-centric sorting?

Public pension systems in many U.S. states face large funding shortfalls. Movement toward defined contribution (DC) pension structures may reduce the likelihood of future shortfalls. We address some limitations of the existing literature by studying public-sector employees who are enrolled in either a defined benefit (DB) plan or hybrid DB-DC plan, and who at some points have been able to choose between these plans. We find little evidence that the introduction of the hybrid plan increased employee turnover and that turnover is significantly lower among those who transferred from the DB plan to the hybrid plan.

Policymakers and educators alike increasing focus on faculty adoption of interactive teaching techniques as a way to improve undergraduate education. Yet, little empirical research exists that examines the processes whereby faculty make decisions about curriculum design and classroom teaching in real-world situations. In this study, I use the idea of the "problem space" from cognitive science to foreground the importance of actor-situation dynamics in shaping instructional decision making. Using data from a freelisting exercise and retrospective recall interviews, I describe the perceived affordances, planning strategies, and both the planned and enacted curricular artifacts for a group of 58 STEM faculty. Then, to examine these processes as they unfold in practice, I examine the cases of two physics instructors as they planned and taught specific classes. Results indicate the primacy of fixed affordances such as time, course content, and class size, and the influence of time constraints that lead to the dominant planning strategy of recycling and fine-tuning old lecture notes and PowerPoint slides. The paper also delves into the importance of these artifacts as cultural tools that mediate practice. The paper contributes a new approach to the study of instructional decision making while also providing actionable insights to improve practice. In particular, I recommend instituting departmental policies that require faculty to engage in brief, post-class and post-course reflection that results in minor updates to their curricular artifacts and will not require a significant time commitment.

The teaching performance expectations and assignments that preservice art teachers currently address in field experiences and in their coursework are designed to help them meet the expectations of being a quality art educator in the 21st century. These assignments may be very different from the assignments that art educators had in their preservice programs just a decade ago. Using tasks from a current preservice assignment, this White Paper presents information and how-to steps that provide essential understandings and relevancy about gathering and using assessment data and assessment procedures in a manner that is clear and supports practical perspectives for art educators. Assessment White Papers for Art Education is a collection of essays that teach about current and established assessment practices and theories, and how they are relevant to all of the National Art Education Association's membership. This series offers a starting point for NAEA members--across all levels--as well as parents, administrators, and the general public to understand assessments' applications to art education.

The increasing tension between the perceived necessity of a college degree and the challenge of paying for it has led to a proliferation of financial aid policy in the U.S. and around the world. More students are receiving more aid today, and more different types of aid, than ever before. Half a century of policy experimentation has led to an equally impressive accumulation of research evidence, facilitated by methodological advances and the widespread availability of student-level administrative data. In this chapter, we present the economic rationale for financial aid, a summary of how aid works in the U.S. context, and common methodological challenges in the study of financial aid. We then review the evidence from both inside and outside the U.S. on the causal impact of a variety of financial aid policies and programs on students' college decisions, attainment, and post-college outcomes, and summarize the overarching themes with respect to margins of impact, mechanisms, and heterogeneity. We conclude with a discussion of future directions for research.

Prepared for a Strategic Education Governance learning seminar, this working paper analyses the ways in which the Dutch government tried to reach overarching goals in education, in a system characterised by a high degree of distributed autonomy of education institutions and the participation of multiple actors, and consequently a government highly dependent on the collaboration with stakeholders. The paper introduces four perspectives on governance: 'traditional public administration', 'new public management', 'network governance' and 'societal resilience'. In practice, these perspectives do not exclude each other. Based on three cases the paper shows that the Dutch government used simultaneously different perspectives in each case and across the cases, in various combinations. Each combination proved to have its pros and cons. The paper argues for a deliberate consideration and choice of governance perspectives as an important element of policy preparation.

A defining characteristic of current U.S. educational policy is the use of data to inform decisions about resource allocation, teacher hiring, and curriculum and instruction. Perhaps the biggest challenge to data-driven decision making (DDDM) is that data use alone does not automatically result in improved teaching and learning. Research indicates that translating raw data into useable information and actionable knowledge for teachers requires not only adequate technical and social supports, but also an awareness of how educators in real-world settings actually use information to make decisions. Yet, little is known about DDDM in higher education, in general, and how postsecondary faculty make sense of and use data in their instructional decision-making processes, in particular. In this paper, we use naturalistic decision-making theory to generate practice-based descriptions of how 59 STEM faculty at three large public research universities used data as part of their course planning. Interview transcripts and notes taken while observing planning meetings were analyzed using an inductive approach to content analysis. In practice, respondents used different types of data and other information obtained from, for example, student assessments, end-of-semester evaluations, and conversations with colleagues. Results indicate that faculty generally collect and analyze data in informal, ad hoc scenarios ungoverned by institutional policy. Exceptions include disciplines with accreditation pressures and team-taught courses where structured (and supported) opportunities exist for faculty to collect, analyze, and reflect upon data about student learning. Thus, while numeric data are clearly viewed by this population of faculty as the most rigorous, in practice, even those that use quantitative data also use other sources of information. These results suggest an opportunity for educational leaders to design policies and professional development initiatives that facilitate a more formal collection of and reflection on data by faculty. In pursuing such technical solutions, however, policymakers and educational leaders must carefully negotiate the tension between rigor and relevance, and learn from the challenges experienced in the K-12 sector regarding DDDM.

In this paper we consider more than three decades of research on teachers' unions in the United States. Focusing on unions' role in shaping education policy, we argue that collective bargaining and political organizing comprise the two central but distinct forms of influence at the district, state and national levels of decision-making. We note recent changes in state policy directly and indirectly affecting unions and union priorities. We argue that these changes may result in a variety of different conditions under which unions operate, and suggest that this variation represents fertile ground for new empirical analyses of union influence. Such work may in turn require a reconsideration of the extent of, and limitations to union power in altered educational landscapes.

The two recently-filed New York lawsuits claiming that teacher tenure laws violate children's constitutional right to a "sound basic education" are finally dragging the long-obscure Section 3020-a of the state's Education Law into the spotlight. This attention is badly overdue because for decades § 3020-a has impeded efforts to ensure a minimum competence level among New York's teachers. Section 3020-a is a 3,000-word section of New York's Education Law, entitled "Disciplinary Procedures and Penalties," which mandates that tenured teachers can be dismissed only after just cause has been established through statutorily-prescribed administrative hearings. Teachers are evaluated in their schools under the Annual Professional Performance Review, the state's high-profile new evaluation system. But decisions on whether poorly-performing teachers stay or go are still made according to the decades-old § 3020-a law. This report presents analysis of the official decisions filed at the conclusion of § 3020-a hearings for New York City teachers from July 1, 1997 through June 30, 2007. It aims to shed light on the role and function of § 3020-a, to further public awareness of the law's impact on New York's schools, and to promote wider debate around how to fix it. The report presents Key findings, and concludes that while teachers are legally entitled to due process to protect them from unfair dismissal and unjustifiable accusations of inadequate performance, the current system goes far beyond that, prioritizing the rehabilitation of ineffective teachers over ensuring adequate teaching for children. Fixing the broken § 3020-a system is not "the" solution to fixing the schools, but it is a problem that urgently needs to be addressed. The report includes two appendices: (I) Obtaining § 3020-a Decisions and (II) Convictions & Penalties for § 3020-a Cases (July 1 1997-June 30, 2007).

This study compared the benefits and costs associated with online versus paper-and-pencil surveys for a random sample of undergraduate students. Students completed the College Selection Survey, which had them evaluate the soundness of 10 reasons for choosing, or not choosing, to attend the university, if they could make their choice over again. Half of the sample was contacted by mail and asked to complete the paper-and-pencil survey. The other half was contacted by e-mail and asked to complete the same survey online. Willing students participated in focus groups to discuss how influential the survey reasons would be if they could select their college over again. The overall response rate was 33.3 percent for the paper-and-pencil sample and 26.2 percent for the online sample. A higher percentage of traditional age than nontraditional students responded online. Students in the two groups had similar feelings about whether they would choose the institution again, with 66.7 percent saying yes, 8.9 percent saying no, and 24.3 percent undecided. Students believed that the main advantage to online surveying was its convenience, though students without computers considered it difficult to find open computers in the campus laboratories. (Contains 15 references.) (SM)

This paper reports the results of a large, school-level randomized controlled trial evaluating a set of three informational interventions for young people choosing high schools in 473 middle schools, serving over 115,000 8th graders. The interventions differed in their level of customization to the student and their mode of delivery (paper or online); all treated schools received identical materials to scaffold the decision-making process. Every intervention reduced likelihood of application to and enrollment in schools with graduation rates below the city median (75 percent). An important channel is their effect on reducing nonoptimal first choice application strategies. Providing a simplified, middle-school specific list of relatively high graduation rate schools had the largest impacts, causing students to enroll in high schools with 1.5-percentage point higher graduation rates. Providing the same information online, however, did not alter students' choices or enrollment. This appears to be due to low utilization. Online interventions with individual customization, including a recommendation tool and search engine, induced students to enroll in high schools with 1-percentage point higher graduation rates, but with more variance in impact. Together, these results show that successful informational interventions must generate engagement with the material, and this is possible through multiple channels. [Funding for this report was provided by the Heckscher Foundation for Children and the NYU Institute for Human Development and Social Change.]

This chapter reviews the extensive literature to date on CCTs for education. Section 2 provides background on the origins and expansion of CCTs globally, and describes basic design features and variation in characteristics across programs. Section 3 presents a theory of change and an economic household decision-making model highlighting key comparative statics and empirical predictions for the introduction of an education CCT program. Section 4 discusses key methodological challenges in evaluating the impacts of education CCTs. Section 5 integrates and updates the extensive evidence to date on the impacts of education CCTs on various outcome domains over the life cycle, and provides the most comprehensive view to date on learning impacts by meta-analyzing new evidence from more than 30 studies--substantially more than prior reviews of the literature. Section 6 reviews the evidence on indirect and general equilibrium effects. Section 7 presents a simple model of costs commonly used in the literature, which we extend to analyze cost-effectiveness for a subset of programs. Section 8 concludes and highlights open questions for future research.

Cut scores are used in a variety of circumstances to aid in decision making through the establishment of a clear cut line between adjacent categories. Community colleges regularly use cut scores on placement tests to decide the appropriate course for each beginning student: the first college-level course or a developmental course, depending on student test performance. This initial placement decision sets the stage for the student's college career and must be made in the most defensible manner possible to withstand any challenges that may arise. This paper provides a broad overview of important considerations in the generic standard setting process. Specific standard setting methods are only touched upon briefly, but many commonalities in actions and processes exist among the various standard setting methods. This paper covers both actions and processes at a level that is accessible to the non-psychometric layman with only a basic understanding of assessment. The paper also provides an overview of the key elements to consider in choosing a placement test, for which the cut scores are implemented and provides case studies. Placement decisions can only be as good as the instrument and cut scores upon which they are based. Areas for potential placement testing research are also provided. (Contains 2 figures and 6 footnotes.)

Accountability in the private and public sectors of society has received significant attention in both research and practice, partly because of its importance, but also because it is challenging to define, measure and implement. The nature of accountability is complex, ambiguous and highly context-dependent. As related to postsecondary education (PSE), multiple stakeholders across the nation have been pushing for greater accountability for at least three decades. Various stakeholders, including elected officials at the national and state level seemingly obsessed with achieving a "one size fits all" kind of accountability system, continue to produce proposals and in some cases legislation, for our institutions of postsecondary education to provide, among other matters, evidence of improved degree production, cost control, and student learning. This paper identifies who some of the stakeholders are and provides a range of accountability initiatives underway since a Center for Studies in Higher Education report, "Accountability in Higher Education: A Public Agenda for Trust and Cultural Change," was presented in 2006, including a specific focus on California. [The 2006 report is available in ERIC at ED503070.]

Once again, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide on the contentious issue of Affirmative Action, and specifically the use of race in admissions decisions in public universities. Despite differences in the details, seasoned veterans of affirmative action debates are experiencing déjà vu. In this case, Abigail Noel Fisher claims overt racial discrimination when the highly selective University of Texas at Austin (UT) rejected her freshman application in 2008. The Court's ruling could range from upholding the legal precedent of allowing race to be one of many factors in admissions; to a more narrow decision that rejects UT's particular use of race, but sets new limits on such decisions; to an outright rejection of using race in any form as one among many factors universities currently use in admissions. In this paper, I discuss the case and present a number of themes that should be considered by the Court and by the public, including problems with the notion of a "critical mass" of minority students; that arguments regarding academic merit are complex and nuanced; and that among highly selective public universities, where demand from many qualified students far exceeds the supply of admissions spots, admissions policies have arbitrary outcomes despite the best efforts to create rational and explainable admissions policies. As much as anything, the Fisher case is about the appropriate locus of admissions policy and decisions. The historical precedent, as reiterated by Justice Sandra Day O'Conner in the 2003 "Grutter" case, is that judgments related to the question of admissions, including the idea of sufficient critical mass of underrepresented students and factors that indicate future academic success, are, in the end, judgments that should remain within the Academy and which the courts should not infringe on without a compelling need to do so. There is no compelling need in the Fisher case. Simply agreeing to hear the case seems to indicate a willingness by the Court to overrule past precedent. Yet there is also a possibility that the Court's decision will be influenced by the prospect that a ruling against affirmative action will, for the first time, have meaning for selective private institutions, which have largely avoided scrutiny of their admissions practices and biases. As all of the justices are products of eastern elite private institutions, this could be an important consideration, although speculative.

For many students at community colleges, finding a path to degree completion is the equivalent of navigating a shapeless river on a dark night. While academic preparation and financial supports are critical components of student success, subtle institutional features may also play an important role. This paper thus reviews the evidence for what is called the "structure hypothesis: that community college students will be more likely to persist and succeed in programs that are tightly and consciously structured, with relatively little room for individuals to unintentionally deviate from paths toward completion, and with limited bureaucratic obstacles for students to circumnavigate". This review of the literature inside and outside of higher education suggests that the lack of structure in many community colleges is likely to result in less-than-optimal decisions by students about whether and how to persist toward a credential. Though there is no silver-bullet intervention to address this problem, this paper highlights several promising programs and suggests directions for future experimentation and research. (Contains 8 footnotes.)

This working paper is one in a series of projects initiated by the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) to improve knowledge for child care researchers and policy makers about parental child care decision making. In this paper, the authors identify three distinct conceptual frameworks for understanding child care decisions--a rational consumer choice framework, a heuristics and biases framework, and a social network framework--and review the major assumptions, contributions, and possible limitations of each of these frameworks. They then discuss an integrated conceptual model, the accommodation model that draws from each of these frameworks. The first three frameworks come primarily from the fields of economics, psychology, and sociology, respectively. It is the authors' sense that most research about child care decision making has been informed by the theories, assumptions, and empirical methods of one or more of these frameworks, either explicitly or implicitly, and they provide some examples and elaborate the basic tenets of each framework. The integrative accommodation model was first presented by Marcia Meyers and Lucy Jordan (2006). They develop and elaborate this model more fully here with explicit attention to its relation to the rational consumer choice framework, the heuristics and biases framework, and the social network frameworks. These frameworks are presented as complementary, rather than mutually exclusive. For a process as complex as parental child care decisions, each can provide a different and useful lens through which to understand unique aspects of the factors, processes and outcomes of parental child care decisions. When considered together, they believe they may inform one another and the development of more integrative models, such as the accommodation model presented here. It is the authors' hope that researchers working primarily within one of the conceptual frameworks discussed here will benefit from learning about other frameworks. In some cases, this may simply suggest additional or new variables to consider when specifying a particular model, while still working from the same conceptual framework. In other cases, it may result in integrative approaches that address multiple dimensions of the decision making process--dimensions that may not be as obvious when working within a single framework. In the concluding section the authors discuss some of the issues and the implications for future research. A goal of this paper is to advance knowledge that can inform public policy efforts. Given that the Child Care Development Fund (CCDF) has an explicit goal of supporting parental choice for child care, it is critical that they expand and deepen everyone's knowledge about the processes through which parents make decisions and the consequences for the choices they make (Zaslow, Halle, Guzman, Lavelle, Keith, Berry, & Dent, 2006). The different perspectives offered by each of the three frameworks and the integrative accommodation model may help policy makers identify the policy and program levers that can prove important at different stages of the decision making process. (Contains 7 footnotes.)

During the late 1990s, the convergence of women's labor force participation rates to men's rates came to a halt. This paper explores the degree to which the role of education and marriage in women's labor supply decisions also changed over this time period. Specifically, this paper investigates women's decisions to exit the labor market upon the birth of a child. The results indicate that changing exit behavior among married, educated women at this period in their lives was not likely the driving force behind the aggregate changes seen in labor force participation. Rather, changes in exit rates among single women, particularly those less educated, are much more consistent with the changing pattern of aggregate female labor force participation. Complete Estimation Results is appended. (Contains 6 footnotes, 5 figures and 1 table.)

Politics, economics, and technology have conspired to make this an exceptionally challenging time for American higher education. Some critics claim that costs are out of control in traditional public and private nonprofit higher education. They believe these institutions will soon go the way of the railroads as for-profit institutions displace them and the Internet replaces college campuses and classrooms. Other critics bemoan the privatization of higher education and the increasing role of market forces. Still others think higher education has lost its way and fails to focus on educating undergraduates. With their cries of alarm and simple nostrums for change, these critics often miss the mark because they do not recognize the strengths of the current system and the complexity of the problems it faces. Yet defenders of American higher education who paint a rosy picture are held too much in thrall by its venerable traditions, manifest accomplishments, and worldwide reputation for excellence. The modern university is worth protecting but it must also change in substantial ways.

It is clear that families and communities play key roles in student achievement and school improvement efforts. Across the nation, states are leading initiatives to improve communication and engagement with these stakeholders through effective data sharing. Key points highlighted in this brief include: (1) Maintaining close ties with family and community is recognized as one of five critical supports for school improvement (Bryk, 2010); (2) Data sharing can help parents and families understand how their children are performing and where gaps exist in student achievement as well as guide them in taking appropriate action to support academic success (The Education Trust, 2004); and (3) Decision makers should consider taking steps to understand the needs, wants, barriers, and motivations of stakeholders; develop community or family action plans; create materials that are customized for recipients; and incorporate social marketing concepts into data dissemination practices (National Dissemination Center for Children with Disabilities, 2011; National Center for the Dissemination of Disability Research, 2001; Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 2009). A list of resources is provided.

As a research and technical assistance organization, CNA Education would be the last to deny the importance of good data and the first to applaud efforts to improve the quality and scope of the data available. Solid data are critical to CNA's mission to further general understanding of the efficacy of specific education reform initiatives and to address the needs of their district-level and state-level customers and constituents for a clearer assessment of their own specific efforts and of the available options for improving their education outcomes. The three papers in this collection ("The State Data Analysis Gap: A Threat to Education Reform" by Arthur Sheekey and Michael Allen; "Getting State Education Data Right: What We Can Learn from Tennessee" by Kyle Southern and Joe Jones; and "The Equitable Distribution of Effective Teachers: Can States Meet the Research Challenges Required for Success?" by Michael Allen) make the strong case, however, that the availability of good data is not all that policymakers and educators need for their decisions. In addition, they need to understand the limitations of their data and how to use and interpret them appropriately. And they must ask--and answer to their satisfaction--a number of conceptual and technical questions that have implications for the validity, interpretation, and very meaning of the data they seek to use.

Community college students typically have access to a large selection of courses and programs, and therefore the student transcripts at any one college or college system tend to be very diverse. As a result, it is difficult for faculty, administrators, and researchers to understand the course-taking patterns of students in order to determine what programs of study they appear to be pursuing. Attempting to examine these patterns and then comparing them with listed program requirements would be a very time-consuming activity. The most common way of assigning a program of study to a student--picking the subject in which she has taken the most courses--is overly simple, because many programs require courses across several subjects. However, because students who have similar patterns of course-taking in terms of subjects and particular courses taken are likely to be in similar programs, clustering can be a useful way to make sense of the relevant data. Clustering allows researchers to group similar items into clusters, relying only on a measure of the similarity of those items. In this paper, we apply a clustering algorithm to the problem of understanding college transcripts, which serve as the items to be clustered. To our knowledge, this is the first effort to organize transcripts based on their course content using clustering. We base the measure of similarity on the proportion of curricular subjects that each transcript has in common with every other one. Our data are community and technical college transcripts for a cohort of students who first entered the Washington State system during the fall of the 2005-06 academic year and who had no prior postsecondary experience. We used our clustering algorithm to separately cluster liberal arts and career-technical students. We found that the algorithm did a good job of separately clustering each of these groups. The clusters roughly corresponded to programs of study, so we were able to estimate how many students were undertaking each program and what subjects students were studying within each cluster. We were also able to examine the demographics and the completion and transfer rates of the students within each cluster, in order to get an idea of what types of students were in each program of study and how successful they seemed to be in college. We found substantial variation on these dimensions as well as on the extent to which students' programs were either concentrated in a single subject or spread across several subjects. Clustering is a powerful way to understand the course-taking patterns of students and assign programs of study. It makes few prior assumptions about the data; rather, it allows the data to organize itself based on a similarity measure. It relieves the analyst of determining what the program categories should be. It has the ability to detect patterns of activity across subjects within student transcripts. Note that although we have applied this method to community college students, it is applicable at all levels of postsecondary education. We conclude that this method would be useful to researchers throughout education who are trying to understand student course-taking patterns and programs of study, and who need to organize large amounts of transcript data. Appended are: (1) Details of the Cluster Analysis; (2) Details of the Cluster Analysis; and (3) Five Clusters of Liberal Arts Student Transcripts. (Contains 10 tables and 3 footnotes.)

Does public information about school quality lead parents to sort their children out of schools with relatively poor performance? Use of this exit option in response to information about school quality has the potential to indirectly foster school responsiveness to quality concerns. To determine whether this information affects student exit, I use a regression discontinuity design to examine the effect of school grades on exit. Results indicate that parents do not seem to respond to information about school quality generally and, thus, cast doubt on the effectiveness of indirect accountability to promote educational improvement. However, there is limited evidence that particularly poor school performance accompanied by institutional mechanisms for school choice promote student sorting away from low-quality schools. (Contains 12 figures, 9 tables, and 11 footnotes.) [Funding for this paper was provided by the National Science Foundation's IGERT program.]

Enrollment is rising across the nation's community colleges, but completion rates remain untenably low. Reformers are focusing on the importance of using comprehensive, high-quality data on student progress and completion to bring about change. A core tenet of Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count has been to embed a culture of data-informed decision making on campuses and in state capitals. To move this work forward, a group of data experts from Achieving the Dream's state policy teams came together in 2005 to design and test a valuable set of intermediate measures that demonstrate how community college students progress--or, as is too often the case, fail to progress--toward a credential or further education. Most important, this Cross-State Data Work Group showed the predictive power of interim indicators for identifying students in great need of intervention early enough to help boost their chances of staying in and finishing college. "On the Road to Success" presents the next step taken by the Cross-State Data Work Group: a comparative analysis of a comprehensive set of intermediate milestones and final measures of success that practitioners and policymakers can use to rethink and remake their approaches to increasing student achievement. Any institution in the country can use these "Benchmarks of Student Success"--a set of key indicators of community college student progression and completion--to frame strategic planning. This is one of the first times such comparative data are being reported publicly. The state-level data in this brief represent only part of what the members of the Data Work Group have collected and reported, and their cross-state conversations will continue. Perhaps an even more powerful impact will be derived as states turn this analytic approach inward and examine the comparative effectiveness of colleges within a single state. Benchmarks for Student Success are appended. (Contains 11 figures, 1 table, and 10 endnotes.) [For "On the Road to Success: How States Collaborate and Use Data to Improve Student Outcomes. Executive Summary," see ED537263.]

It is important to understand how students' changing belief structures influence their values and behaviors, including their ethical beliefs and decision-making patterns. As such, this study will address the following research questions: 1) what are students' ethical beliefs and their perceptions of students' ethical behaviors; and 2) how do students' personal values and perceptions of behaviors differ? Using data from the 2006 University of California Undergraduate Experience Survey, survey items about ethical decisions are grouped according to their association with the following themes: academic integrity and honesty, social activities, and behaviors influenced by perceptions of convenience. When analyzing student responses to the UCLA wildcard module within UCUES [University of California Undergraduate Experience Survey] with these thematic constructs, it is possible to identify patterns of personal ethical belief, perceptions of ethics among peers, and differences between these two classes of variables. Our research indicates that students' perceptions of their peers' beliefs and behaviors are the best predictors of the respondents' own ethical behavior. Within academia, particularly in subject areas that engender greater competition such as science and engineering, it is important that institutions promote an explicit code of conduct. If students are taking cues from their peers as to the what beliefs and behaviors are appropriate, a strong message from the institution, the faculty, and staff can intervene in this process in order to promote ethical decision making skills and practices. (Contains 3 figures and 3 tables.)

This paper shows how three critical enrollment indicators drawn from a relationship database were used to guide planning and management decisions. The paper discusses the guidelines for the development of the model, attributes needed, variables to be calculated, and other issues that may improve the effectiveness and efficiency of daily enrollment analysis and reporting for institutional researchers, enrollment managers, and registration personnel using Banner, Datatel, and Peoplesoft packages. Comparative student headcount, full-time equivalent (FTE) information, and credit load information within 126 registration days of fall 1999 and fall 2000 were analyzed and discussed. This information is a rich source for those who struggle with fundamental daily enrollment management issues before and after the semester begins. A college or university will find the daily enrollment analysis an added value for academic planning activities and for predicting enrollment at a given point during the registration period. (SLD)

The focus of this paper is a group of rural high school students and the factors that contributed to their participation in mathematics classes beyond those minimally required for high school graduation. The author follows Gutierrez (2002) in referring to participation as course taking, particularly in elective and advanced mathematics classes. The paper begins by describing the research methodology and research setting (a small high school in a rural community in the U.S. Pacific Northwest) followed by a presentation and discussion of the survey results. Next readers are introduced to three students enrolled in advanced mathematics classes (Pre-calculus or Calculus). Drawing on interview data, the author highlights some of the factors they offered for enrolling in elective mathematics courses. The paper concludes with a discussion of the students' responses, and some suggestions designed to increase rural student enrollment in advanced mathematics courses. (Contains 1 table.)

What do you want to accomplish? Whatever it is, you need money to do it, and on most campuses, the biggest source of funding is enrollment-related revenue from students. Yet, interestingly, perhaps because most chief executives are more familiar with fundraising, opportunities to strengthen enrollment revenue often receive less attention than major donors. This paper is designed to help bridge this gap. In 10 succinct points, readers who know and understand fundraising will learn how to easily transfer that knowledge to understand the enrollment revenue stream. You'll see how you can work more closely with your enrollment team to exert greater influence over enrollment, its revenue, and strategic enrollment planning. After reading this paper, the hope is that you will: (1) Gain a better understanding of how to manage enrollment to accomplish strategic institutional goals; (2) Know where your support and leadership is crucial to your enrollment team; and (3) Identify ways to exert more influence over enrollment-related revenue.

Recent trends in the labor force participation of women have brought much public attention to the issue of women opting out. This paper explores the decision of working women to exit the labor market at a time of major transition--the birth of a child--utilizing linked vital statistics, administrative employer, and state welfare records. The results indicate that, consistent with utility maximization theory, women are not just opting out but rather are accurately assessing the potential opportunity and direct labor market costs of their exit decisions and are making workforce exit decisions based on measurable costs and benefits. (Contains 11 footnotes, 5 figures and 4 tables.)