The Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice – Policy Briefs, Research Reviews
Its mission is to improve public education for all students in the Great Lakes region through the support and dissemination of high quality, academically sound research on education policy and practices. Its published work is done by independent researchers associated with major universities across the country; is empirically sound and meets recognized requirements of academic and social science scholarship; and, is subject to a rigorous peer review process. http://greatlakescenter.org/
National Education Policy Center – Policy Briefs, Research Reviews
The mission of the National Education Policy Center is to produce and disseminate high-quality, peer-reviewed research to inform education policy discussions. We are guided by the belief that the democratic governance of public education is strengthened when policies are based on sound evidence. http://nepc.colorado.edu/
Fact Checks
Media Matters for America Example: Stossel’s Attacks On Public Education Feature Misleading, Out-Of Context…
Background on Attacks on Public Education The global assault on teaching, teachers, and their unions: stories for resistance
Cited by 26.
Kathleen Malu review: “This edited volume should be required reading for everyone interested in public education. In a series of powerfully written chapters, the editors make an irrefutable case for their argument that teachers’ unions have a critically important role to play in shaping the future of public education. Moreover, they show how this future is currently under attack across the globe from big business and conservative politicians including neoliberals and social conservatives.” http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/radical_teacher/v084/84.malu.html
Preventing Future High School Dropouts, a new publication from NEA, can help affiliates play an important role in preventing students from dropping out of school. Written for busy Association leaders and staff, this comprehensive but user-friendly resource covers six aspects of the dropout problem:
Where the crisis is located and what affiliates can do about it
Ways to address out-of-school factors that increase dropout rates
School practices and policies that increase high school graduation rates
Negative effects dropouts have on the nation’s economy
Programs, practices, and policies that increase high school graduation rates
Graduation and dropout statistics in understandable terms
This guide is an excellent resource for NEA state and local affiliates that want to help communities develop tailored plans for keeping students on track.
Grad Nation: A Guidebook to Help Communities Tackle the Dropout Crisis – a resource that echoes many of the strategies NEA advocates – is available online from America’s Promise Alliance, one of NEA’s national dropout prevention partners.
The user-friendly guidebook is an excellent resource for NEA state and local affiliates that want to help communities develop tailored plans for keeping students on track to graduate from high school, prepared for college, work and life.
Grad Nation contains research-based guidance for addressing a community’s dropout crisis, links to additional online resources, and ready-to-print tools such as informational handouts to build support for community action, forms and tables to help organize and analyze local data, and charts to guide local decision making.
Authors Robert Balfanz, associate professor at the Everyone Graduates Center housed at the Center for Social Organization of Schools, Johns Hopkins University, and John Bridgeland, president and CEO, Civic Enterprises, provide step-by-step guidance for:
Rallying a community to end its dropout crisis and increase high school graduation rates
Mapping the exact nature of a community’s dropout crisis
Developing comprehensive solutions to address the crisis
Moving forward to create lasting change
Released in late winter of 2009, America’s Promise plans to update the guidebook’s content periodically as new information becomes available and communities share what they have learned working with the guidebook’s resources.
Earning sufficient credits from year to year in middle and high school to advance from grade to grade is a significant predictor of graduating.
According to “Course Credit Accrual and Dropping Out of High School, by Student Characteristics” a report from National Center for Education Statistics (NCES, 2009). The researchers used data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 to examine the number of credits earned by high school students and the relationship between course credit accrual and dropping out. Findings include:
High school dropouts earned fewer credits than did on-time graduates within each year of high school, and the cumulative course credit accrual gap increased with each subsequent year.
The pattern of dropouts earning fewer credits than on-time graduates remained across all examined student and school characteristics (student sex, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, school location, and sophomore class size).
The size of the cumulative course credit accrual gap between on-time graduates and dropouts varied within academic years for males versus females, Blacks and Hispanics versus Whites, and students attending city high schools versus students attending suburban, town, and rural high schools.
PDF, 7.78 MB, 30 pgs.)David C. Berliner, Bruce J. Biddle, 1995: The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, And The Attack On America’s Public SchoolsJohn F. Jennings, 1996: Travels Without Charley
