"State requirements that high school graduates pass exit exams were the leading edge of the movement towards standards-based reform and continue to be adopted and refined by states today. In this study, we present new empirical evidence on how exit exams influenced educational attainment and...

This paper explores the phenomenon referred to as test score inflation, which occurs when achievement gains on quot;high-stakesquot; exams outpace improvements on quot;low-stakesquot; tests. The first part of the paper documents the extent to which student performance trends on state assessments...

Low-achieving students in many school districts are retained in a grade in order to allow them to gain the academic or social skills that teachers believe are necessary to succeed academically. This practice is highly controversial, with many researchers claiming that it leads to higher dropout...

Roughly one in four juveniles arrested in the U.S. spend time in a detention center prior to their court date. To study the consequences of this practice for youth, we link the universe of individual public school records in Michigan to juvenile and adult criminal justice records. Using a...