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This article examines the extent to which indicators of the college-going climate of urban high schools are associated with students’ application to, enrollment in, and choice among four-year colleges. The investigators examine two mechanisms by which high schools may shape college enrollment among low-income students in an urban school system: (1) by ensuring whether seniors who aspire to a four-year college degree take the steps to apply to and enroll in a four-year college, and (2) by influencing whether students enroll in colleges with selectivity levels at or above the kinds of colleges they are qualified to attend (a “college match”). We investigate different approaches to measuring college-going climate and develop new indicators. Findings suggest that qualifications and college aspirations will not necessarily translate into four-year college enrollment if urban high schools do not develop organizational norms and structures that guide students effectively through the college application process. Urban students who attend high schools where there is a pattern of four-year college-going, where teachers report high expectations and strong supports for college attendance, and where there is high participation in financial aid application are more likely to plan to attend, apply to, be accepted into, and enroll in a four-year college that matches their qualifications.

Advocates of high-stakes testing argue that providing strong incentives for students to take learning more seriously will result in greater student effort and motivation. Opponents argue that these policies set up low-achieving students to fail, looking to research on motivation for evidence that extrinsic and negative incentives such as the threat of retention will undermine students' engagement in school. This article seeks to evaluate these claims by examining the responses of 102 low-achieving sixth- and eighth-grade students to Chicago's highly publicized effort to end social promotion. Does this policy lead students to work harder? If so, to what extent does hard work pay off? The majority of these students described increased work effort under the policy. They reported greater attention to class work, increased academic press and support from teachers, and more time spent studying outside school. These efforts were confirmed by teachers' reports. Students with high levels of work effort generally had greater-than-average learning gains and positive promotional outcomes. Approximately one third, however, showed little work effort despite a desire not to be retained. These students faced significantly larger skill gaps and barriers to learning both within and outside school than did their peers with high work effort. How teachers manage high-stakes testing policies—whether they create environments that make low-achieving students feel supported and efficacious in responding to new demands and whether they direct students' efforts in productive ways—has an important impact on student motivation and passing rates.

In the mid-1990s, the Chicago Public Schools declared an end to social promotion and instituted promotional requirements based on standardized test scores in the third, sixth, and eighth grades. This article examines the experience of third and sixth graders who were retained under Chicago's policy from 1997 to 2000. The authors examine the progress of these students for 2 years after they were retained and estimate the short-term effects of retention on reading achievement. Students who were retained under Chicago's high-stakes testing policy continued to struggle during their retained year and faced significantly increased rates of special education placement. Among third graders, there is no evidence that retention led to greater achievement growth 2 years after the promotional gate. Among sixth graders, there is evidence that retention was associated with lower achievement growth. The effects of retention were estimated by using a growth curve analysis. Comparison groups were constructed by using variation across time in the administration of the policy, and by comparing the achievement growth of a group of low-achieving students who just missed passing the promotional cutoff to a comparison group of students who narrowly met the promotional cutoff at the end of the summer. The robustness of the findings was tested using an instrumental variable approach to address selection effects in estimates.

For many urban adolescents, the transition to and early years of high school are a time of academic difficulty and increasing school disengagement. In Chicago, over 40% of ninth graders fail one or more major subjects in the first semester. This article examines patterns in the relative risk of course failure and recovery from failure over the first four semesters of high school in one urban school system. It examines how failure rates vary as a function of race, ethnicity, gender, age, and prior achievement and examines between-school variation in student petformance. Males and Hispanic students are particularly at risk. Few students recover from grade failure, and early failure often translates into poorer later performance. Schools vary widely in rates of failure and recovery--variation that remains after adjusting for differences in schools' student body composition. Implications for further research and policy are discussed.

High dropout rates among students who repeated grades are often cited as evidence that grade retention is harmful. This article uses event history analysis to explore whether and how a grade retention influenced graduation outcomes among one cohort of youths from an urban school system. Repeating a grade from kindergarten to sixth grade was associated with a substantial increase in the odds of dropping out even after controlling for differences in background and postretention grades and attendance. This article explores whether grade retention may influence school dropout because it makes students overage for grade. Students who ended sixth grade overage for grade experienced substantial disengagement during middle school; nearly one quarter dropped out, and those who remained had significant declines in attendance. I find that the impact of being overage for grade during adolescence may explain a large proportion of the higher dropout rates among retained youths.

This article analyzes the impact of high-stakes testing in Chicago on student achievement in grades targeted for promotional decisions. Using a three-level Hierarchical Linear Model, we estimate achievement value added in gate grades (test-score increases over and above that predicted from a student’s prior growth trajectory) for successive cohorts of students and derive policy effects by comparing value added pre- and postpolicy. Test scores in these grades increased substantially following the introduction of high-stakes testing. The effects are larger in the 6th and 8th grades and smaller in the 3rd grade in reading. Effects are also larger in previously low-achieving schools. In reading, students with low skills experienced the largest improvement in learning gains in the year prior to testing, while students with skills closer to their grade level experienced the greatest benefits in mathematics.

Melissa Roderick, Jenny Nagaoka, and Vanessa Coca focus on the importance of improving college access and readiness for low-income and minority students in urban high schools. They stress the aspirations-attainment gap: although the college aspirations of all U.S. high school students, regardless of race, ethnicity, and family income, have increased dramatically over the past several decades, significant disparities remain in college readiness and enrollment. The authors emphasize the need for researchers and policy makers to be explicit about precisely which sets of knowledge and skills shape college access and performance and about how best to measure those skills. They identify four essential sets of skills: content knowledge and basic skills; core academic skills; non-cognitive, or behavioral, skills; and “college knowledge,” the ability to effectively search for and apply to college. High schools, they say, must stress all four. The authors also examine different ways of assessing college readiness. The three most commonly recognized indicators used by colleges, they say, are coursework required for college admission, achievement test scores, and grade point averages. Student performance on all of these indicators of readiness reveals significant racial and ethnic disparities. To turn college aspirations into college attainment, high schools and teachers need clear indicators of college readiness and clear performance standards for those indicators. These standards, say the authors, must be set at the performance level necessary for high school students to have a high probability of gaining access to four-year colleges. The standards must allow schools and districts to assess where their students currently stand and to measure their progress. The standards must also give clear guidance about what students need to do to improve. College readiness indicators can be developed based on existing data and testing systems. But districts and states will require new data systems that provide information on the college outcomes of their graduates and link their performance during high school with their college outcomes.