School districts increasingly gauge school quality with surveys that ask about school climate and student engagement. We use data from New York City's middle and high schools to compare the long-run predictive validity of surveys with that of conventional test score value-added models (VAMs)....

High school exit exams are meant to standardize the quality of public high schools and to ensure that students graduate with a set of basic skills and knowledge. Evidence suggests that a common perverse effect of exit exams is an increase in dropout for students who have difficulty passing...

The “Greene Method” of calculating school “graduation rates” and the Manhattan Institute (MI) criticisms of official graduation and completion statistics are outlined and scrutinized. The methodology fails to recognize the complexity of the issue and appears to ignore the considerable...

The United States led all other nations in the development of universal and publicly-funded secondary school education and much of the growth occurred from 1910 to 1940. The focus here is on the reasons for the high school movement' in American generally and why it occurred so early and swiftly...