Student Poverty, School Accountability, and Postsecondary Enrollment: A Challenge for Educational Reform in Kentucky

The aim of this study is to detect the school characteristics/attributes by examining the efficiency of school management related to innovative teaching through digital mobile e-learning. This will be conducted by evaluating the results of DEA efficiency measure and data mining method (DMM).The results of DMM indicate that the schools with the total number of students in schools about 1400-3000 persons, the teacher-student ratio between 7.4 %-8.0 %, the tablet PC numbers about 1200-3000 units, the technical teacher ratio of digital mobile e-learning is about 8%-16% and the total equipment expenses associated with tablet PC about the range of 1.5-3.0 Million NTD could obtain higher operational efficiency of school management through Innovative Teaching via Digital Mobile e-learning. Based on the analytical results, the ranks of school management efficiency could divide into three groups, in the high-efficiency group (TE=1), there are three public high schools and one private higher vocational school. These all high schools are in northern Taiwan. In the medium-efficiency group (TE 0.85∼0.99), there is only one school in northern Taiwan. The low-efficiency school group (TE <0.85), there are three public schools and one private high vocational school. The three public schools are in northern Taiwan while one private high vocational school is in eastern Taiwan. In practice, we find that the public high schools are more efficient than the private high schools and public high schools are more efficient than private high schools that can achieve digital mobile e-learning. Also, and schools located in northern Taiwan more efficient than elsewhere. These research findings can also become a reference for educational institutions in developing strategies and policies for digital mobile e-learning in high school of Taiwan area.

ABSTRACTThis study examined the association between the high school counselor–parent relationship and students’ postsecondary enrollment (PSE) in a nationally representative sample of 4,406 parents selected from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009. Findings indicated that parents’ postsecondary expectations, their participation in schools, and STEM engagement were all positively related to students’ postsecondary enrollment. Parent contact with the school counselor was negatively associated with taking postsecondary classes.

YOU have to give those middling students--the ones who just get by academically--some credit for doggedly finishing high school and going to work. You might even give them an A in economics because they appear to have a better grasp of reality than the experts who tell them their only option is college. These kids aren't reading tea leaves. But they probably are reading the media reports about job prospects, soaring college costs, diminishing incomes, and conflicting explanations for what's going on in the economy. Many recent high school graduates who enroll in community colleges do so just to please their parents, according to a recent study by MDRC. They really don't have any other motivation to be there until they are several years older. Then they may well come to realize that more education might help them escape low-wage work. Why, these young people might ask, should I go into debt for an uncertain future? Half of college students now borrow money to attend college, up from 35% in 1993. Today, those who graduate have an average debt load of $19,000, and this sum is modest when compared to those who enroll at prestigious campuses. If they do graduate from college, these young people will be making less than college graduates of a few years ago, and only two-thirds of them will have jobs with health-care benefits, down from 71% five years ago. Meanwhile, a young person who focuses on career and technical education courses and enters the labor force immediately after graduating from high school can earn a decent salary. If that young person has good work skills, shows up on time, and exhibits initiative--professionalism on the job, as one study describes it--employers are more likely to invest in his or her training. According to a recent column in the New York Times, more college education is no guarantee of success in a globalized economy. Princeton University economist Alan Blinder, a former vice president of the Federal Reserve, was quoted as challenging those who blithely assume that the labor market will be divided between those with more education and those with less. In the future, Blinder said, children are educated may prove to be more important than how much ... but education specialists have not begun to think about that problem. Nevertheless, public policies these days hold out postsecondary enrollment as the ultimate goal for everyone. And when all the advantages are at last sorted out, postsecondary may indeed be the factor that eventually protects members of the work force from leading low-income lives. Like many other analyses of this sort, it's not simple. High school students who concentrate on career and technical courses are less likely than the college-prep students to enroll in college or to persist in earning any kind of degree. However, 65% of the class of 1992 who focused on career and technical curricula in high school had enrolled in college by 2000, according to a longitudinal study by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). And though these students entered high school with lower grades on average, their postsecondary enrollment is on a par with that of students who enrolled in a general education plan in high school. Moreover, almost 20% of career and technical concentrators scored in the top quartile on eighth-grade reading and math tests, and one-fourth of the high school class of 1992 completed both a career and technical education and a college-preparatory curriculum. If the job market and job security seem to be in chaos right now, at least policy makers are seeing value in kids' interest in career training. Several state legislatures this year mandated that secondary school students choose a career path, both to hold their interest in school and to encourage them to mix academic and career-related courses. …

This article examines the efficiency of the education system and measures the effectiveness of public and private senior high schools in the city of Bandung. The samples for this study are 20 high schools in Bandung comprising 10 private schools and 10 public schools. A quantitative approach was utilized as the research design. The analytical tools used are multiple linear regression and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The results showed that private high schools were more efficient than public high schools in Bandung with an average efficiency rate of 91.49%. The achievements of high school students in the city of Bandung are influenced by the number of teachers, number of staff, number of students, school expenses, and graduate teachers, while the teacher's teaching experience does not affect student achievement. Our findings show that private schools are more efficient than public schools. Meanwhile, the amount of the cost of attending private schools is higher, and they tend to serve a smaller, more affluent population. These results highlight the need for policymakers to consider the trade-off between efficiency and equity when making educational funding and resource allocation decisions.

The structure of the higher education market in 2012–2021 in 38 European countries was analyzed using concentration levels and Herfindahl-Hirschman indices based on the number of higher education institutions and their share in the QS World University Rankings, and the number of students. This market in 2021 has a low concentration: the 3 countries with the largest number of higher education institutions (Germany, Ukraine, France) covered about 36% of the market in total; the 3 countries with the largest number of universities in the QS (United Kingdom, Germany, Italy) – 5%; the 3 countries with the largest number of students (Germany, France, United Kingdom) – 37%; and the 3 countries with the largest number of foreign students (United Kingdom, Germany, France) – 5%. Using parametric and non-parametric comparison tests, it was found that although the number of higher education institutions and students does not generally depend on the population’s income level, the number of universities ranked in the QS and foreign students does. The correlation analysis revealed that GDP and GNI, population, and separately the employment and unemployment rates (for ranked universities and foreign students) are important factors that determine the uneven structure of the higher education market. The identified factors formed the basis for clustering countries using Ward’s hierarchical method, which revealed the clear existence of 3 clusters: the smallest of them accumulates the 4 largest European economies with the most ranked universities; the largest (24 countries) is quite diverse, which indicates relatively equal opportunities in the market and its unification. Acknowledgment Tetiana Vasylieva and Artem Artyukhov thank project 0122U000772, and Nadiia Artyukhova thanks project 0124U000545 for carrying out their part of this research.

Background/Context There is an expansive body of research concerning high school graduation; however, most studies omit students who persist through four years of high school without earning a diploma. In addition, there is scant research exploring longer term outcomes among students whose academic trajectories do not fit within the traditional four-year model of high school graduation, including eventual graduation, postsecondary enrollment, or engagement in the workforce. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study The current study addresses the substantive gaps in research regarding high school noncompletion by examining the college and workforce outcomes of persisters—defined here as students who do not formally withdraw from high school, nor earn a regular diploma, four years after entering high school as a first-time ninth grader. Research Design The present study accessed five years of linked, longitudinal, student-level administrative data from the Maryland Longitudinal Data System. Multilevel models assessed the relationship between student- and school-level factors with the odds of students earning a high school diploma four years after beginning their freshman year. Independent variables included student-level demographic and academic indicators and school-level concentrations of student characteristics. Conclusions/Recommendations This study offers a first look into the academic and employment trajectories of an understudied and high-risk group of young adults. The multilevel examination of student- and school-level factors indicated that on-time graduation for four-year persisters should be understood as a function of students within their academic environment. Overall, persisters had less favorable college and workforce outcomes when compared with students who earned a high school diploma, suggesting the need for interventions that promote college and workforce readiness across the population of persisters. The findings presented herein suggest that the phenomenon of persisting should be considered, along with dropout, as a critical element of a more informed analysis of high school graduation. Implications for research, policy, and practice are discussed.

Sir William Bragg once said, “The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them. ” Given that there are so many endless ideas, since this is a world where curiosity is planted, but still we can’t deny the fact that we just end up being ultimately curious about things. Bragg said that there is a need to discover new ways of thinking about science. But what needed the most is the facilitator, the facilitator who can be of big help in organizing facts and can be the bridge to invent new ways of understanding science. The teachers, the facilitators, the educators are the most needed to help learners understand so much of the world, to understand science. “It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge. ” This is a quote from Albert Einstein, which tackles the purpose of the teacher. In line with this, Science is one of the very complex subjects that is being taught nowadays where effort is necessary to catch the interest of the learners. Teaching of science is not just a big challenge to the teachers, but also, it is a point of responsibility, since the educators’ duty is to make students learn like learning to count or to read, learning this substance is also a lifelong process, basically because it is a big part of individuals’ everyday life. It is the schools’ concern to help their teachers sharpen students in science, especially because the reality that awaits the learners is everything about science. Besides, it is anticipated that science curriculum of a state is capable of aiding scientific manpower not undermining the truth that it echoes the essentials, ethics, welfares and goals of the society. In public secondary schools, science teaching is no joke since large number of students in the Philippines are said to be studying in Public or Government schools. Due to fast tracking time, the present quickly reached its saturation point, and there were lots of changes occurred in the realm especially in the educational system. The country, feasibly, is going along with the transformations of the world. Teaching science in public secondary schools is one of those greatly affected areas in education. Subsequently there were studies saying that science secondary education in the Philippines lags behind other countries in the world. It turns out that teachers together with the education sector of the country must strive harder to escalate the state’s science education, particularly in public schools. The focus of this study was to describe the creative and critical thinking skills of junior high school students as assessed by teachers and students themselves. The descriptive method of research was applied in the study, with the questionnaire as the main data gathering instrument responded to by 71 science teachers and 369 students along the public secondary schools in Batangas City. From the teachers’ assessment in creative thinking skills, the highest weighted mean is application of distributed reasoning or brain storming in the context of cooperative groupings which obtained 3.27 weighted mean and verbally interpreted as greatly manifested. While from the students’ assessment, the results revealed that they greatly manifest extension of one's idea to a concrete outcome by applying learned concepts and principles which obtained 3.39 weighted mean. From the teachers’ assessment in creative thinking skills, making unusual association or connections between seemingly unrelated or remote ideas were the lowest mean scorer of 2.97, manifested. On the other hand, in students’ assessment the lowest weighted mean is making unusual association or connections between seemingly unrelated or remote ideas and is manifested by students with a weighted mean of 3.04.

The Government of Ghana recognizes the importance of education for improving the socioeconomic well-being of young Ghanaians and the development of the nation. Education currently accounts for the largest share: 31%) of Ghana's national budget: GNA, 2012). Educational reforms and investments have had remarkable success in improving access to education up to the Junior High School: JHS) level, but progression beyond JHS remains a challenge. More than half of JHS graduates do not gain admission into Senior High School: SHS) because of poor academic performance and the inability of those who qualify to afford the drastic increase in educational costs. Stakeholders have focused on different ways to address these educational challenges. Researchers who study the developmental effects of owning assets: e.g., savings, home, land, livestock, etc.) in particular have begun paying attention to ways in which personal: e.g., savings) and household: e.g., assets) economic resources can improve young people's educational outcomes. This emerging area of work is guided by the asset-effects framework, which posits that economic resources may influence educational outcomes directly through being able to pay for tuition and school supplies and indirectly through their influence on cognitive processes: e.g., academic self-efficacy and expectations). Empirical evidence from around the world suggests potential connections, but there are significant research gaps on how specific types of economic resources affect educational outcomes. For instance, while most studies that link income and educational outcomes find strong relationships between income and children's academic performance, others find mixed or contradictory results. The mixed results suggest the need for further conceptualization and empirical research to clarify the nature of the relationships between different types of economic resources and academic performance. To help address the research gaps, this study uses nested cross-sectional data from an ongoing youth savings experiment to examine potential direct and indirect associations between two types of economic resources--parents' income and household assets--and math and English scores of middle school-age youth in Ghana. In addition, the study assesses the possibility that gender moderates the relationships between the aforementioned types of economic resources and math and English scores. Using multilevel structural equation modeling techniques, the study does not find strong evidence to support the hypothesized direct relationship between economic resources and educational outcomes. However, the study finds strong evidence that parents' income and household assets indirectly affect math and English scores through young people's academic self-efficacy and expectations. These findings suggest that psychological factors such as academic self-efficacy and expectation are more predictive of youth academic performance than economic resources. Subgroup analyses also show that gender moderates the indirect relationships between economic resources and English scores but not math scores. This finding concerning possible gender differences could inform policymakers about economic resources that may promote parallel outcomes for boys and girls.

A Higher Calling: Toward a More Spacious Role for Academic Advisors

Near the close of the school year of 1919-1920, a test of abil ity to perform the more or less mechanical operations of chem istry was given to a large number of high-school and university students. Twenty high schools participated, fourteen being in medium or small Minnesota cities and the remaining six being outside of Minnesota. Two groups of university freshmen were represented : ( 1 ) those who had taken one year of chemistry in the university, but who had not taken chemistry in high school ; and (2) those who had taken one year of chemistry in the Uni versity and who, in addition, had offered chemistry as an entrance subject. The first group consisting of 57 students is designated in the tables below as U19 the second group (168 students) is designated as U2a. Table I shows the number of schools which used the test and the number of students who took it.

Public elite and specialized high schools in New York City have a very low enrollment of Black and Latino students. Project 2011 is an intensive preparatory instructional program to improve acceptance rates for Black and Latino children to the eight specialized public high schools in New York City. Initiated and funded by District 17 and 18 of the New York City Department of Education (NYC DOE) and supported by Kaplan K12 Learning Service, Project 2011 offers curriculum and training for the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT), which is the only eligibility criterion for acceptance to New York City specialized high schools. Pre-test and post-test assessments that were administered to participating students indicated that the program significantly improved students' performance on a practice test. Implications for student achievement and factors that influence their scores on the SHSAT, standardized tests, and school work are discussed.Keywords: specialized high schools, SHSAT, high schools, high school admissions process, equal educational opportunityLITERATURE REVIEWSince the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) ruling over half a century ago, concerns over equal educational opportunity continues to be widespread (Muller, Riegle-Crumb, Schiller, Wilkinson, & Frank, 2010). Many studies reveal circumstances that restrict access to education in academically competitive public high schools due to the use of a singular assessment to determine placement. New York City (NYC) Public School system's elite and specialized high schools are strongly impacted by inequality and access to education (Gootman, 2006; Mazie, 2009; Santos, 2012). The resulting impact on Black students is strongly evident in the research (Banchero, 2012; Deresiewicz, 2008; Muller et al., 2010).The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 addresses the issue of equal access to education and calls for a movement to increase academic standards (Mazie, 2009). In accordance with NCLB, many cities, like New York City, have been recognized for addressing the racial achievement gap in early education. However, they have not been as successful at the high school level, particularly at their top public schools, which require an entrance (Gootman, 2006). According to Dobbie and Fryer (201 1), exam schools make up over half of U.S. News and World Report's top 100 American high schools, and 20 out of 21 high schools designated as the 'public elite' by Newsweek (p. 1). Governments, such as China, Malaysia, Romania, Singapore, and Turkey, also use entrance exams to determine admission into their secondary schools (Dobbie & Fryer, 2011). The existence of exams schools in the U.S. has sparked intense debate on issues of educational inequality, particularly among political philosophers who are knowledgeable of public education systems and recognize the need to move beyond discussions of civic education to promoting educational parity (Mazie, 2009).Equal educational opportunity for all students is particularly important because research shows a direct correlation between academic success in high school and SES of future generations (Muller et al., 2010). Muller et al. (2010) recognized stratification in educational opportunity that extended beyond expected socioeconomic status (SES) differences to race. Specifically, the study mentions African American and Latino students' differential educational opportunities in comparison to their White counterparts. Furthermore, unequal public funds for education have always been a problem in the United States. Even private funds raised by the parent-teacher associations (PTAs) are impacted by the socioeconomic status of their communities (Mazie, 2009). Schools in lower SES communities are often deprived of basic and necessary educational materials. Compounding matters, Johnson, Richeson, and Finkel (2011) posit that students from lower SES environments, which are disproportionately Black and Latino, also encounter negative psychological influences. …

Current federal legislation (i.e., No Child Left Behind (NCLB)) requires states to set rigorous academic standards, ensure classroom instruction addresses these standards, and measure and report students' progress via large-scale assessments. NCLB assumes that inclusive accountability systems and standards-based reform will result in improved educational quality across states and school districts and increased access and opportunity for all students. In this article, we focus on three potential areas of influence for consultants committed to pursuing social justice in and through these policies: facilitating students' access to the general curriculum; promoting equity in educational outcomes; and empowering educators and families to make appropriate decisions regarding participation in assessments. We also discuss challenges and lessons learned from providing systems-level consultation to support inclusive accountability and standards-based reform in numerous states. We conclude by offering ideas for future research and guidelines for providing consultation that facilitates social justice by creating improved opportunities and outcomes for all students.

This paper empirically investigates the impact of COVID-19 epidemic on rural poor students and their families in colleges and universities in Chongqing. The results show that COVID-19 epidemic will aggravate the academic and employment difficulties of rural poor college students. It seriously affects the family income of rural poor college students, which can easily lead to poverty of rural poor college students and their families. In view of the challenges and problems, this paper puts forward the educational assistance countermeasures for the rural poor students and their families in colleges and universities in Chongqing during the epidemic prevention and control period by adhering to the "four combinations" and precise implementation of policies.

Public education is a sphere of society in which distributive justice with respect to the allocation of opportunities to learn can have profound and lasting effects on students’ educational outcomes. We frame our study in the distributive justice literature, and define just outcomes specifically from a meritocratic and strict egalitarian perspectives in order to investigate how assignment to academic tracks and the availability of opportunities to learn during high school are associated with students’ academic achievement during college. We examine the role of “just” placement into high school academic tracks, “just” access to high-quality teachers, and “just” assignment of secondary schools’ resources in high school, in relation to college freshmen’s grade point averages (GPA). We utilize longitudinal data from a unique dataset with over 15,000 students who spent their academic careers in North Carolina public secondary schools and then attended North Carolina public universities. Our results suggest that “unjust” assignment of students to certain high schools, access to high-quality teachers, and assignment to learn in specific academic tracks result in long-lasting consequences that are reflected in freshman college GPA. Importantly, findings also show that the direction and magnitude of the relationship between distributional injustice at schools and college performance is moderated by students’ own gender and race. Race and gender interact with the high schools’ institutional contexts operationalized by tracking practices, teacher quality, and by school racial and socioeconomic composition. Results show that similar settings do not affect all students in the same ways.

This article examines the expectation to complete a bachelor's degree among a predominantly low-income, mainly African American, panel of Baltimore youths at the end of high school, at age 22, and at age 28. Across this time, stability is the modal pattern, but when expectations change, declines are more frequent than increases. Although disadvantaged youths and those with limited academic resources from high school are the most prone to give up the expectation to complete college, both factors recede in importance during the transition to adulthood when postsecondary enrollment becomes more salient. Clark's “cooling-out” thesis and Rosenbaum,s “college-for-all” thesis predict a downward leveling of ambition, especially among youths with high expectations and limited resources and those who attend two-year colleges. The results indicate, however, that the expectations of low-resource youths are not distinctively cooled out by the college experience, and, net of other considerations, two-year college attendance is associated more with warming up than with cooling out. Hence, the dynamics proposed by Clark and Rosenbaum do not adequately account for changes in college expectations over the years after high school. A broader framework, situated in life-course ideas, is recommended.