Impact Of School Reform On Dropout Rates And Test Scores In An Urban High School

Abstract

The primary focus of the study was to explore the effect of School Within a School reform on two components in the Adequate Yearly Progress Report by which Texas schools are measured - dropout rates and scores on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test. The demographics of the particular study sample included 11th grade students considered economically disadvantaged, English language learners, and regular, as well as special education students, attending an urban Texas high school. Data were acquired from the Texas Education Agency and hypotheses were tested with a non-parametric test of statistical significance, chi-square. Results indicated that the reform made a positive impact on dropout rates and on math and English Language Arts scores.

Effects of A Comprehensive Array of Dropout-prevention Interventions: Responders vs. Non-responders

“…Thus, new small schools generally favored higher-income families who could pay for test preparation (Rodgers, 2014 works" or not. For example, the fact that enrollment in a small school is positively and significantly related to academic improvement for low-income students (Bartlett et al, 2011) says nothing about the size of the improvement, which might be very small.…”

“…Certainly, without more sources of funding or a change in funding formulas, small schools are not a viable intervention to scale upwards, since funding was already a major barrier to implementation (AIR & SRI, 2006;Bartlett et al, 2011, Bloom et al, 2010Rodgers, 2014). As of 2009, OUSD ran 26 small secondary schools.…”