What Does the First Year of High School Say About Future Prospects?

In this article in JESPAR, James Kemple, Micha Segeritz, and Nickisha Stephenson (New York University) report on their study of entering ninth graders in New York City high schools from 2001 to 2010 to see if the district’s way of spotting which students were on track for graduating with a Regents diploma in four years was accurate. The city had been looking at whether a student earns 10 or more course credits in ninth grade, and Kemple, Segeritz, and Stephenson found that was quite a reliable indicator of being on track for a Regents diploma (those below this cut-off clearly need additional services). 

The researchers found that adding another criterion – passing at least one Regents exam – brought about a significant improvement in the reliability of the on-track indicator. The 10 credits-plus-one-Regents indicator was reliable and stable across the seven cohorts of New York City high-school students and correctly predicted the graduation status of 85 percent of the students who entered ninth grade in 2007. This confirms earlier studies, indicating that, “regardless of their performance in elementary and middle school, students’ engagement and performance in their first year of high school offer strong signals about their prospects for earning a diploma and being prepared for college 4 years later,” say the authors.

The study also found significant differences in on-track performance among different racial, gender, and economic groups and between different high schools. 

“Building On-Track Indicators for High School Graduation and College Readiness: Evidence from New York City” by James Kemple, Micha Segeritz, and Nickisha Stephenson in Journal of Education for Students Placed At Risk (JESPAR), January-March 2013 (Vol. 18, #1, p. 7-28), http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/hjsp20/current; Kemple is at james.kemple@nyu.edu. 

From the Marshall Memo #476