More than 50 percent of students who have completed Algebra II in high school find themselves in a remedial math course in college. (Even 13 percent of those who complete Calculus do.) How can this happen?

A new report suggests that these students have been pushed through basic math concepts, such as math modeling and complex measurement, so they can complete high school graduation requiContinue Reading »

Someone needs to tell U.S. News & World Report‘s Robert Morse that data he says he wants to include in his magazine’s high school rankings are already available. In a short interview with the Education Writers Association’s Emily Richmond, Morse said:

The rankings don’t tell us how students do once they leave a high-scoring high school – for exContinue Reading »

Before you roll your eyes at another MOOC story, consider this: An Ohio community college has developed a math MOOC not for its students, but for its local high school students. Why? To get more students math-ready before they come to campus.

It’s an interesting take on the Massive Open Online Course, which — for all its fanfare — still hasn’t seemed to have developed a scalable, sustainContinue Reading »

More than 1.3 million high school seniors have already completed a Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) this year, up 2.4 percent from the same time period last year. In D.C. public schools, however, the percentage of students completing a FAFSA is down 6.9 percent from a year ago. (You can download the data for your local high schools here.)

We’ve been tracking this data allContinue Reading »

This spring the U.S. Department of Education has been releasing real-time completion data for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) for every high school in the country. I’ve been following the progression in D.C. public schools for the The Quick and the Ed (see the latest installment here). This month, I sat down with Greg Darnieder, a senior adviser to U.S. Secretary of EducatiContinue Reading »

Two years ago, Steve Schneider, a high school guidance counselor in Sheboygan, Wisc., had been fairly satisfied. More than 90 percent of his students graduated every year, and according to senior exit surveys, about three-quarters went to a four-year institution, with the remaining enrolling in local, technical colleges.

Or so he thought.

In fact, about half of South High School gContinue Reading »

More than half a million high school seniors have already completed a FAFSA this year, up more than 10 percent from the same time period last year. In D.C. public schools, however, the number of students completing a FAFSA is down 3.2 percent from a year ago. (You can download the data for your local high schools here.)

D.C. students are progressing, but they appear to be behind last yeaContinue Reading »

Only about one in eight high school seniors at District of Columbia public schools have completed a Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) at this stage in the application cycle. These  completion rates suggest that while some District of Columbia high schools are well on their way to getting students financially prepared for college, others haven’t had a single student complete the fContinue Reading »

The mere mention of international measures of performance is rare in a NCLB waiver. Everyone knows how poorly American students stack up against their global peers on assessments like PISA, so it’s no surprise that states shy away from comparing their own student achievement against international assessments. Instead, states choose to benchmark academic progress against their own past performanContinue Reading »

There’s an important new study out looking at what happened in states that mandated all high school juniors take a college entrance exam. It measured the impacts for the first two states with mandates in place, Colorado and Illinois, which both created mandates around the year 2000 forcing all students to take the ACT*. It found some promising results.

Obviously test-taking went up, partContinue Reading »