This study investigated the extent to which life skills training was offered to middle and high school students with autism and life skills training needs after high school. A secondary analysis of the National Longitudinal Training Study-2 (NLTS-2) data was conducted in this study. This study found that the majority of the middle and high school students with autism (77.4%) had received life skills training in school. Receipt of life skills training differed across students' gender, age, diagnosis of intellectual disability, and functional mental skills. Students received life skills training in general education classrooms, special education classrooms, individual instruction, and community settings. Life skills training was needed for the majority of the high school leavers with autism (78%).
The purpose of this study is to apply hierarchical linear growth modelling to district demographic and effectiveness data in the U.S. states of Ohio and Texas to identify districts that are significantly outperforming or underperforming their demographic and resource characteristics from the entire population of districts in a state. The study focuses on administrative panel data for the years 2006-2012 for all districts in Ohio (n=608) and 2005-2011 for all districts in Texas (n=1028). Our findings indicate that: 1) Multiple district demographic variables and financial expenditures, such as enrollment, student ethnicity, district location, and general and school administration expenditures per pupil have a significant relationship to growth in district academic achievement; 2) we identified 32 significantly outperforming districts in Texas and 15 districts in Ohio; 3) we compare this identification system with state accountability indicators through a quadrant plot to provide a new framework for site selection in district effectiveness research, which has important implications for the policy and practice of re-envisioning school district effectiveness.
As a local education agency, school districts play an important role in the local control and making educational decisions. Previous quantitative studies on school districts using longitudinal dataset have assumed that all school district effectiveness (SDE) changes in a common pattern, while ignoring the probability that there might exist distinct subgroups of SDE trajectories. Thus, the purpose of the present study was to examine the existence of multiple SDE changing patterns and how school district demographic variables and financial expenditures affect classification of SDE groups using a growth mixture model (GMM) with a national longitudinal dataset including all public school districts in the United States from 2009 to 2015 (n = 11,185). The results indicated that (a) there exists three different classes of school district effectiveness growth trajectories, which can be named as a constant SDE group (3.66%), a decreasing SDE group (34.16%), and an increasing SDE group (62.18%); (b) school district demographic characteristics such as a percentage of free lunch students and general administration expenditure per pupil are significantly associated with the probability of group classifications; and (c) the longitudinal effects of school district demographic covariates and financial expenditures within each class such as school district locations (e.g., urban, suburban, etc.) are associated with the growth factors (intercept and slopes) in different ways.
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