In an effort to increase both adolescents' engagement with school and academic achievement, school districts across the United States have created small high schools. However, despite the widespread adoption of size reduction reforms, relatively little is known about the relationship between size, engagement and outcomes in high school. In response, this article employs a composite measure of engagement that combines organizational, sociological, and psychological theories. We use this composite measure with the most recent nationally-representative dataset of tenth graders, Educational Longitudinal Study: 2002, (N = 10,946, 46% female) to better assess a generalizable relationship among school engagement, mathematics achievement and school size with specific focus on cohort size. Findings confirm these measures to be highly related to student engagement. Furthermore, results derived from multilevel regression analysis indicate that, as with school size, moderately sized cohorts or grade-level groups provide the greatest engagement advantage for all students and that there are potentially harmful changes when cohorts grow beyond 400 students. However, it is important to note that each group size affects different students differently, eliminating the ability to prescribe an ideal cohort or school size.

Given the dominance of residentially based school assignment, prior researchers have conceptualized K-12 enrollment decisions as beyond the purview of school actors. This paper questions the continued relevance of this assumption by studying the behavior of guidance counselors charged with implementing New York City's universal high school choice policy. Drawing on structured interviews with 88 middle school counselors and administrative data on choice outcomes at these middle schools, we find that counselors generally believe lower-income students are on their own in making high school choices and need additional adult support. However, they largely refrain from giving action-guiding advice to students about which schools to attend. We elaborate street-level bureaucracy theory by showing how the majority of counselors reduce cognitive dissonance between their understanding of students' needs and their inability to meet these needs adequately given existing resources. They do so by drawing selectively on competing policy logics of school choice, narrowly delineating their conception of their role, and relegating decisions to parents. Importantly, we also find departures from the predictions of this theory as approximately one in four counselors sought to meet the needs of individual students by enlarging their role despite the resource constraints they faced. Finally, we quantify the impact of variation in counselors' approaches, finding that the absence of actionguiding advice is associated with students being admitted to lower-quality schools, on average.

We examine a set of academic and social outcomes in 9th grade, comparing middle school attendees with those who attended K-8 schools. Previous research with these data has shown that there are few differences in 8th-grade outcomes by school type. Here we extend these findings to determine whether school form influences student outcomes in the first year of high school. The results reveal several domains in which attendance at a middle school results in worse outcomes (e.g., greater rates of course failure); however, we find that a large portion of the difference by type of a student's 8th-grade school is accounted for by differential rates of attendance at the district's magnet schools. That is, our results indicate that type of school attended during the middle grades is significantly and positively related to magnet school attendance and thereby on the academic outcomes in the 9th-grade year.Transitions between schools are often difficult times for students, a point at which grades decline and behavioral difficulties increase. As Barber and Olsen (2004) argue, although school transitions are detrimental to students' performance and well-being, there are significant gaps in the research on the topic, particularly about school-related factors such as school size, grade configuration, and student composition. One question that has not been satisfactorily addressed is whether any particular schooling form-or pairing of two forms, such as middle school into high school-is significantly better or worse for students.There are compelling reasons to think that features of the sending school (e.g., middle school) might influence how successfully a student makes the JOURNAL OF RESEARCH ON ADOLESCENCE, 20(4), 825-839 r

New York City's public specialized high schools have a long history of offering a rigorous, college preparatory education to the city's most academically talented students. Though immensely popular and highly selective, their policy of admitting students using a single entrance exam has raised questions about diversity and equity in access. In this paper, we provide a descriptive analysis of the “pipeline” from middle school to matriculation at a specialized high school, identifying group-level differences in application, admission, and enrollment. In doing so, we highlight potential points of intervention to improve access for underrepresented groups. Controlling for other measures of prior achievement, we find black, Hispanic, low-income, and female students are significantly less likely to qualify for admission to a specialized high school. Differences in application and matriculation rates also affect the diversity in these schools, and we find evidence of middle school “effects” on both application and admission. Simulated policies that offer admissions using alternative measures, such as state test scores and grades, suggest many more girls, Hispanics, and white students would be admitted under these alternatives. They would not, however, appreciably increase the share of offers given to black or low-income students.