Improving Alignment Between Postsecondary And Secondary Education

Author : Jacob S. Jackson
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781267760722
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (67 download)

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Download or read book K-12 and Postsecondary Alignment written by Jacob S. Jackson and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My dissertation investigates the impacts of policies intended to increase student success through the educational pipeline. The increasing importance of educational attainment in the labor market has led to a host of policies aimed at strengthening the links between high school and postsecondary education and workforce. Two such policies are high school exit exams and college readiness assessments for high school students. Effort on the part of California policymakers to evaluate high school students on their pathway out of high school and into college has had a host of intended and unintended consequences. In this dissertation, I analyze the impact of two specific programs California on public high school students and their schools.In the first chapter, I investigate whether a high school assessment intended to provide students with early information about their level of college readiness impacts a student's decision to attend college. I use a unique dataset that matches the census of students in California high schools with the census of students from the California State University (CSU) system. Using a regression discontinuity design, I estimate the causal effect of the college readiness signal on students' application behavior. I find a small positive impact of the signal on students' decision to apply to a CSU who just pass the college readiness threshold (or a small impact on the decision not to apply for those students who just miss the readiness threshold). In the second chapter, I explore the relationship between the high school assessment for college readiness and subsequent college readiness and academic performance of high school students. Using school-level data from a census of California's public high schools, I employ a difference-in-difference model to determine whether participation in the early assessment program leads to higher school-level outcomes, by both accountability measures under the No Child Left Behind Act, as well as other college readiness metrics. I find evidence that higher levels of program participation are related to higher levels of college readiness and better accountability measures.In the third chapter, I examine California's high school exit examination, specifically the relationship between enrollment in a remediation course and subsequent success on exit exam retests for students who initially fail the high school exit exam. I utilize detailed longitudinal individual-level data for three cohorts from one large urban school district. The findings suggest that math remediation is associated with a higher likelihood of passing an exit exam retest, whereas English language arts remediation has only a modest relationship with retest success. The programs I investigate, like so many education programs, are difficult to evaluate. First, these programs are not implemented in a vacuum and often occur simultaneously with many other education reforms. Second, the students and schools that select into participating in these education programs may also be more sympathetic to the goals of the program. In each of these papers I employ empirical strategies unique to the context of these policies and programs to account for potential confounding variables and selection bias.