Connecting Entrance and Departure

Abstract

Recent reports have demonstrated that the United States has a dropout crisis of alarming proportions. In some large-city school systems, more than 50% of students leave high school without a diploma. A large proportion of these dropouts have not accumulated enough credits to be promoted beyond ninth grade. Using survey and student record data for a cohort of Philadelphia public school students, the authors find that ninth-grade academic outcomes are not simply proxies for student characteristics measured during the pre-high school years and that ninth-grade outcomes add substantially to the ability to predict dropout. An implication is that efforts to decrease the dropout rate would do well to focus on the critical high school transition year.

Theory and Application of Early Warning Systems for High School and Beyond

“…Waiting until the end of the year or first semester is also, to some extent, inconsistent with a key principle of having universal screeners-providing multiple opportunities to monitor student progress during the year. Our analysis of MPS dropouts' last known grade of enrollment and year in high school (constructed using annual enrollment files), shown in Table 1, confirmed findings from previous research (Allensworth & Easton, 2005;Balfanz & Legters, 2006;Neild et al, 2008;Roderick, 1993) suggesting that the process of dropping out is a long and gradual process of disengagement rather than a single, sudden event for many students. For example, the modal year for dropping out among MPS first-time ninth graders from 2001-2002 and 2002-2003 was the fourth year of high school (where 29.4% of all dropouts occurred), although years 3 and 5 also had substantial numbers of dropouts.…”

“…Although it is not uncommon to see claims that at-risk students can be predicted with a high degree of accuracy in the early elementary grades, previous research in this area (see, for example, Roderick, 1993) suggests that this may be more of a challenge than is often acknowledged. This is because outcome information is typically much more limited in the elementary grades than is the case for middle and high school (e.g., no transcript information and limited test score data until around grade 3), and because substantial research (Allensworth & Balfanz & Legters, 2006;Neild, Stoner-Eby, & Furstenberg, 2008) indicates that the transition from middle to high school poses a tremendous challenge to many students, including some who had appeared to be making good academic progress up to that point. Future work in MPS will investigate the extent to which data from the elementary grades (which, since 2008-2009, includes quarterly benchmark assessment results) can be used both to improve predictive power at the high school and middle school grades, as well as to develop indicators that are useful in earlier grades.…”

“…This means that, due to retention, students in a single cohort belong to multiple age cohorts. We decided to anchor our cohort definition in ninth grade because previous research indicated that the transition from eighth to ninth grade is particularly informative regarding a student's future educational outcomes (Allensworth & Easton, 2007;Balfanz & Herzog, 2005;Neild et al, 2008). In the initial phase of early warning work in MPS, we used data from two successive cohorts of firsttime ninth graders in 2001-2002 and 2002-2003, as one of the first tasks was to determine which students had graduated and dropped out.…”

Finnish Straight-A Graduates’ Perceptions of the Smoothness of the Study Paths

“…The nature of general upper secondary education varies not only internationally (see e.g., Klainin & Fensham, 2006;Nagy et al, 2006;Neild, Stoner-Eby, & Furstenberg, 2008) but also among the Nordic Countries (Erikson & Rudolphi, 2010;Wikström & Wikström, 2005) due to differences in education policies and systems. National and local solutions, time allocation of school subjects, the number of obligatory and optional subjects, the names of subjects and their contents, and the total number of study hours in the whole general upper secondary education vary greatly (Tuijula, 2011).…”

Students’ Perceptions of Schooling: The Path to Alternate Education

“…Milestone events, such as the transition to a new educational setting, can cause turmoil and confusion as students negotiate a new environment with new courses, teachers, friends, peer groups, and social norms. This time of transition is important: students who struggle with such a change have a higher likelihood of dropping out (Cohen & Smerdon, 2009;Curran Neild, Stoner-Eby, & Furstenberg, 2008).…”