TL;DR: This paper explored how high schools, through their structures and organization, may influence students' decisions to stay in school or drop out, using a sample of 3,840 students in 190 urban and suburban high schools from the High School Effectiveness Supplement of the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988, applying multilevel methods to explore schools' influence on dropping out, taking into account students' academic and social background.

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Abstract: In this study, we explore how high schools, through their structures and organization, may influence students’ decisions to stay in school or drop out. Traditional explanations for dropout behavior have focused on students’ social background and academic behaviors. What high schools might do to push out or hold students has received less empirical scrutiny. Using a sample of 3,840 students in 190 urban and suburban high schools from the High School Effectiveness Supplement of the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988, we apply multilevel methods to explore schools’ influence on dropping out, taking into account students’ academic and social background. Our findings center on schools’ curriculum, size, and social relations. In schools that offer mainly academic courses and few nonacademic courses, students are less likely to drop out. Similarly, students in schools enrolling fewer than 1,500 students more often stay in school. Most important, students are less likely to drop out of high schools w...

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847 citations

Journal Article•10.1162/EDFP.2006.1.1.50•

The Impacts of Charter Schools on Student Achievement: Evidence from North Carolina

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Robert Bifulco¹, Helen F. Ladd²•Institutions (2)

University of Connecticut¹, Duke University²

29 Mar 2006-Education Finance and Policy

TL;DR: The authors found that students make considerably smaller achievement gains in charter schools than they would have in public schools, and that about 30 percent of the negative effect of attending a charter school is attributed to high rates of student turnover.

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Abstract: Using an individual panel data set to control for student fixed effects, we estimate the impact of charter schools on students in charter schools and in nearby traditional public schools. We find that students make considerably smaller achievement gains in charter schools than they would have in public schools. The large negative estimates of the effects of attending a charter school are neither substantially biased, nor substantially offset, by positive impacts of charter schools on traditional public schools. Finally, we find suggestive evidence that about 30 percent of the negative effect of charter schools is attributable to high rates of student turnover.

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565 citations

Book•10.4324/9781315863672•

Children and their primary schools : a new perspective

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Andrew Pollard

1 Dec 2021

525 citations

Overlooked and Underserved: Immigrant Students in U.S. Secondary Schools

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Jorge Ruiz-de-Velasco, Michael Fix

1 Dec 2000

TL;DR: The United States is being transformed by high, continuing levels of immigration and no American institution has felt the effect of these flows more forcefully than the nation's public schools as mentioned in this paper. And no set of American institutions is arguably more critical to the future success of immigrant integration.

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Abstract: The United States is being transformed by high, continuing levels of immigration. No American institution has felt the effect of these flows more forcefully than the nation's public schools. And no set of American institutions is arguably more critical to the future success of immigrant integration.

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482 citations

Journal Article•10.1162/EDFP.2006.1.1.91•

Charter Schools and Student Achievement in Florida.

[...]

Tim R. Sass¹•Institutions (1)

Florida State University¹

29 Mar 2006-Education Finance and Policy

TL;DR: The authors used longitudinal data covering all public school students in Florida to study the performance of charters and their competitive impact on traditional public schools and found that achievement initially is lower in charters.

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Abstract: I utilize longitudinal data covering all public school students in Florida to study the performance of charter schools and their competitive impact on traditional public schools. Controlling for student-level fixed effects, I find achievement initially is lower in charters. However, by their fifth year of operation new charter schools reach a par with the average traditional public school in math and produce higher reading achievement scores than their traditional public school counterparts. Among charters, those targeting at-risk and special education students demonstrate lower student achievement, while charter schools managed by for-profit entities peform no differently on average than charters run by nonprofits. Controlling for preexisting traditional public school quality, competition from charter schools is associated with modest increases in math scores and unchanged reading scores in nearby traditional public schools.

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426 citations