Resources

Completing College: National and State Reports

The national college completion rates continue to rise. The six-year and eight-year college completion rates have reached new highs, 60 percent and 62 percent, respectively.

As the eighth in the series, the national report presents both the national six-year completion outcomes for the fall 2013 entering student cohort and the national eight-year results for the fall 2011 beginning student cohort, along with historical trends. New analyses of major fields at graduation are added for the first time. The state-level completion outcomes for the fall 2013 entering student cohort largely correspond to the patterns found in the national report.

Program Design Roadmap: Helping Leaders Prepare to Drive Change in Early Childhood Care and Learning

Well-prepared early childhood leaders motivate and inspire their teams, lead more resilient and effective organizations, and mobilize their communities to create systemic change. Yet effective, well-resourced leadership development programs are scarce and scattered. Years of investing in early childhood care and education had made clear to program officers from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation’s Children, Families, and Communities (CFC) and Organizational Effectiveness (OE) teams that the field’s leaders face a host of complex challenges. Arabella Advisors and the Packard Foundation set out to change this by exploring the national landscape of relevant leadership development offerings, learning about leadership development needs directly from early childhood care and learning professionals in California, and identifying the right partners to advance essential training.

The Road to Readiness: The Precursors and Practices that Predict School Readiness and Later School Success

The Promotion Power Impacts of Louisiana High Schools

In partnership with the Louisiana Department of Education and through a grant from the Walton Family Foundation, Mathematica conducted a study that measured each Louisiana public high school’s promotion power, which is a school’s effect on the long-term success of its students as indicated by high school graduation, college or career readiness, college enrollment and persistence, and success in the job market. The study enables Louisiana to become one of the first states to identify its high schools’ contributions to students’ long-term success separately from other factors, such as family resources and students’ learning before high school.

Spring Forward: A clear path for your child’s success

Spring Forward: A clear path for your child's success, is a research-based, bilingual resource to help parents find ways to have a more accurate picture of their child’s progress with grade-level skills.

Campaign resources include direct links to state practice tests and information about school report cards, a take-home one-pager with useful tips, and additional tools such as the new Readiness Check that gives parents a gut check on how their child is progressing in math and reading.

Building Blocks: How One State is Working to Measure and Improve Schools’ Contributions to Early Learning

The early grades lay an important foundation for students’ future academic success. Yet not a single state systematically measures how well its schools support students’ academic growth in the earliest grades, from kindergarten through grade 3. Making student growth in early elementary grades more visible could powerfully inform educational investments, policies, and practices. To better understand its schools’ contributions to students’ learning in the first four grades, the Maryland State Department of Education partnered with the Regional Educational Laboratory Mid-Atlantic to explore constructing a school-level growth measure for kindergarten to grade 3. The study measured students’ growth in reading and math using the KRA and grade 3 Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) assessment.