Measuring Middle School Achievement Trajectories for College Readiness

This study identifies students’ academic trajectories in the middle grades relative to a set of college readiness benchmarks. We apply math and reading college readiness benchmarks to rich longitudinal data for more than 360,000 students across the nation. Student-level and school-level demographic characteristics significantly predict academic trajectories. Compared to White and Asian students, higher proportions of Black and Hispanic student are always off-track throughout middle school. Among students who started 6th grade on track, being male, Black, Hispanic, and attending schools with a higher percentage of low-income students are positively associated with falling off track.

A Promise Kept? The Impact of the El Dorado Promise Scholarship on Student Achievement

We examine whether the El Dorado Promise, a guaranteed college scholarship program for students in the El Dorado School District (EDSD), affected elementary and middle school achievement using a quasi-experimental matching design. We first match the EDSD with similar districts to create a pool of potential comparison students then match students on prior achievement and demographics. The Promise leads to an estimated 0.11 standard deviation gain in math achievement; this effect is statistically significant and practically meaningful. Results are similar from district-level synthetic control and difference-in-differences analyses. We find larger effects on students with above-average prior achievement. We are unable to construct an appropriate comparison group to estimate the impact of the Promise on literacy achievement.

The Enduring Impact of Race: Understanding Disparities in Student Disciplinary Infractions and Achievement

To what extent do persistent race gaps in educational outcomes stem from differences in the level of advantage that students bring to school or from differences in opportunities to succeed? In order to disentangle the component elements of race gaps in middle school achievement and disciplinary infractions, the authors use demographic methods that quantify the proportion of the race gap that is linked to the student, peer, and school composition of race groups. Using administrative school records from North Carolina, the authors find that (1) students' family and demographic characteristics are the most important explanatory factors; (2) the distribution of students across schools with differing racial composition, school sizes, teacher qualifications, and poverty levels also contributes to explaining the gaps; but (3) a substantial portion of each race gap remains unexplained by these compositional differences.