essay on changing schools

One-word Ofsted ratings for schools to be scrapped immediately

The change follows engagement with the education sector and family of headteacher Ruth Perry, who took her own life after an Osted inspection.

Political reporter @fayebrownSky

Monday 2 September 2024 08:47, UK

One-word Ofsted judgements for state schools are being scrapped with immediate effect in a move that has been hailed as a "landmark moment for children".

Previously, the education watchdog awarded one of four marks to schools it inspects: outstanding, good, requires improvement and inadequate.

From this academic year, four grades will be awarded across the existing sub-categories: quality of education, behaviour and attitudes, personal development and leadership and management, the Department for Education (DfE) has announced.

School report cards will be introduced from September 2025, which will provide parents with a "comprehensive assessment of how schools are performing and ensure that inspections are more effective in driving improvement", it added.

The change follows engagement with the education sector and family of headteacher Ruth Perry , who took her own life after an Ofsted report downgraded her Caversham Primary School in Reading from "outstanding" to "inadequate" over safeguarding concerns.

Last year, a coroner's inquest found the inspection process had contributed to her death.

The DfE said "reductive" single phrase grades "fail to provide a fair and accurate assessment of overall school performance" and the change will help "break down barriers to opportunity".

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Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson told Sky News' Breakfast with Kay Burley programme: "We are today making that change because I believe that parents need more information about what goes on within our schools and the system that we've got at the moment just isn't working.

"It's too high stakes, and it doesn't have a sharp enough focus on how we drive up standards in our schools. And that is incredibly important because I want all of our children to get a great education and a great start in life."

The change has been a central mission of the new Labour government, which has vowed to raise standards in state education and generate additional funding through a tax on private school fees .

As part of the announcement today, the government said it will prioritise improvement plans for schools identified as struggling, rather than relying on changing management.

From early 2025, regional improvement teams will be introduced to work with underperforming schools to address areas of weakness.

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In cases of the most serious concern, where schools would have been rated inadequate, the government will continue to intervene.

This could include issuing an academy order, which forces maintained schools to become an academy and which may in some scenarios mean transferring to new management, the DfE said.

Ms Phillipson earlier said: "The need for Ofsted reform to drive high and rising standards for all our children in every school is overwhelmingly clear.

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"The removal of headline grades is a generational reform and a landmark moment for children, parents, and teachers."

She added that single headline grades are "low information for parents and high stakes for schools".

"Parents deserve a much clearer, much broader picture of how schools are performing - that's what our report cards will provide.

"This government will make inspection a more powerful, more transparent tool for driving school improvement. We promised change, and now we are delivering."

Reforms 'could go further'

The announcement comes as pupils return to the classroom this week.

The removal of single headline grades will apply to state schools due to be inspected this academic year, with other settings like independent schools and colleges expected to follow.

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The plans have been welcomed by teaching unions, who have long called for reform.

Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the National Association of Headteachers, said: "We have been clear that simplistic one-word judgments are harmful and we are pleased the government has taken swift action to remove them."

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However, NASUWT general secretary Dr Patrick Roach said while the new government has "made the right decision", it could go further and "end the fallacy that academy conversion is the only route to securing the improvements our schools need".

"Whilst today's announcements are an important step in the right direction, it remains the case that in the absence of root and branch reform to fix the foundations of the broken accountability system, teachers and school leaders will continue to work in a system that remains flawed," he said.

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APA Style is primarily used in the behavioral sciences, which are subjects related to people, such as psychology, education, and nursing. It is also used by students in business, engineering, communications, and other classes. Students use it to write academic essays and research papers in high school and college, and professionals use it to conduct, report, and publish scientific research .

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How I Use AI to Catch Cheaters at School

It's getting harder to spot by the day, but here are some ways you can use ChatGPT to spot student papers using ChatGPT.

It's a tale as old as teaching -- a student, for one reason or another, uses someone else's work to complete their assignment. Only in 2024, that someone else could be an artificial intelligence tool.

The allure is understandable. Away with those shady essay writing services where a student has to plonk down real cash for an unscrupulous person to write them 1,200 words on the fall of the Roman Empire. An AI writing tool can do that for free in 30 seconds flat.

As a professor of strategic communications, I encounter students using AI tools like ChatGPT , Grammarly and EssayGenius on a regular basis. It's usually easy to tell when a student has used one of these tools to draft their entire work. The tell-tale signs include ambiguous language and a super annoying tendency for AI to spit out text with the assignment prompt featured broadly.

For example, a student might use ChatGPT -- an AI tool that uses large language model learning and a conversational question and answer format to provide query results -- to write a short essay response to a prompt by simply copying and pasting the essay question into the tool.

Take this prompt: In 300 words or less, explain how this SWAT and brand audit will inform your final pitch.

This is ChatGPT's result:

I have received responses like this, or those very close to it, a few times in my tenure as a teacher, and one of the most recognizable red flags is the amount of instances in which key terms from the prompt are used in the final product. 

Students don't normally repeat key terms from the prompt in their work in this way, and the results read closer to old-school SEO-driven copy meant to define these terms rather than a unique essay meant to demonstrate an understanding of subject matter.

But can teachers use AI tools to catch students using AI tools? I came up with some ways to be smarter in spotting artificial intelligence in papers.

Catching cheaters with AI

Here's how to use AI tools to catch cheaters in your class:

• Understand AI capabilities : There are AI tools on the market now that can scan an assignment and its grading criteria to provide a fully written, cited and complete piece of work in a matter of moments. Familiarizing yourself with these tools is the first step in the war against AI-driven integrity violations. 
• Do as the cheaters do: Before the semester begins, copy and paste all your assignments into a tool like ChatGPT and ask it to do the work for you. When you have an example of the type of results it provides specifically in response to your assignments, you'll be better equipped to catch robot-written answers. You could also use a tool designed specifically to spot AI writing in papers .
• Get a real sample of writing: At the beginning of the semester, require your students to submit a simple, fun and personal piece of writing to you. The prompt should be something like "200 words on what your favorite toy was as a child," or "Tell me a story about the most fun you ever had." Once you have a sample of the student's real writing style in hand, you can use it later to have an AI tool review that sample against what you suspect might be AI-written work.
• Ask for a rewrite : If you suspect a student of using AI to cheat on their assignment, take the submitted work and ask an AI tool to rewrite the work for you. In most cases I've encountered, an AI tool will rewrite its own work in the laziest manner possible, substituting synonyms instead of changing any material elements of the "original" work.

Here's an example:

Now, let's take something an actual human (me) wrote, my CNET bio:

The phrasing is changed, extracting much of the soul in the writing and replacing it with sentences that are arguably more clear and straightforward. There are also more additions to the writing, presumably for further clarity.

The most important part about catching cheaters who use AI to do their work is having a reasonable amount of evidence to show the student and the administration at your school if it comes to that. Maintaining a skeptical mind when grading is vital, and your ability to demonstrate ease of use and understanding with these tools will make your case that much stronger.

Good luck out there in the new AI frontier, fellow teachers, and try not to be offended when a student turns in work written by their robot collaborator. It's up to us to make the prospect of learning more alluring than the temptation to cheat.

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Recess Duty

How we tried—and failed—to get our kids more outside time during the school day..

As the new academic year approaches, I check off the back-to-school tasks— label folders , disinfect lunch box , buy overpriced required school shoes that will result in blisters and whines —and I also check to see which states, if any, have adopted new laws to require recess. I’m happy to report that California and Washington are joining nine other states that require daily recess this year. This is a change I tried to make in my town years ago—and failed.

Our group, Alabama Families for Recess , began one evening in September 2017 on a front porch during a party. At this time, I had a kindergartner in public school and was shocked by the lack of recess. The result was a pent-up child so tired from being on-task all day that the night ended with a tantrum or, worse, quiet crying in the tub. She simply hadn’t had enough of a break in her seven-hour day, and my efforts to take her to a playground first thing after pickup couldn’t counteract that.

The other parents shared similar stories: exhaustion, irritability, kids getting in trouble at school for rambunctious behavior, and worst of all—curiosity being replaced by apathy. So, wine in hand, we resolved to talk to the principal. It seemed like such a practical, free, improvement. “Who would oppose recess?” I thought. But in advocating for free time during a child’s school day, we had no idea the cultural quagmire we were stepping into.

The principal explained that since our children attended an academically focused magnet school using the International Baccalaureate curriculum , there simply was not room in the schedule to have a daily recess and still comply with the state’s requirements. What’s more, this elementary school serves a student population that is 79 percent students of color and 43 percent economically disadvantaged; it’s ranked fourth in the state for magnet schools. Students won a lottery to attend, so the school’s achievements weren’t connected to admitting only those already performing at advanced levels. The school was getting amazing results by any measurable standards, so I can understand her hesitation to change.

While I could see the principal’s perspective, the research simply didn’t support it. Recess is heavily linked with increased productivity, higher retention rates , and better mental health, and is recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Academy of Pediatrics , and many other child advocacy groups. And while the requirements for the IB program are demanding, the principal could have simply stopped allowing teachers to take away the few recess breaks they did have scheduled. What’s more, while I agreed an IB program would benefit my child academically, I couldn’t ignore her stress levels. Chronic stress can lead to an overactive amygdala , which can then lead to mental health problems later in life.

The principal also pointed to daily PE as an adequate supplement, but those who study child development say otherwise. Children need the unstructured time of recess in order to self-regulate, imagine new games, problem-solve, mitigate conflict, develop internal agency, and refine social skills. Simply put, kids need experience at being in charge of their own time. Lack of that experience, I think, creates the tendency for older kids to fill blank space by staring into the abyss of their phones.

We realized we would need to appeal to a higher authority—and this is where local advocacy can feel like riding a roller coaster after eating a tray of loaded nachos. We had a core group of approximately eight parents willing to take on the fight, including my husband. The rest, like me, had more of an ancillary role.

Thankfully, we had the key component to community action: a leader willing to delve into the inscrutable bureaucratic muck that feels designed to stall groups like mine. Acting off the principal’s information that prohibition of recess came from the state, our leader, Stephanie Jackson, contacted the Alabama Department of Education, the National PTA, and our State Board of Education representative. All of them pointed out that recess was recommended under the Alabama Course of Study and advised her to work with her local school system.

The local superintendent, however, refused to meet with the group. The initiative felt as if it had reached a dead end. But then Jackson talked to someone at the National PTA who set up a phone call with parents who had secured Florida’s recess law of 20 minutes a day.

They provided a model for success. We started an online petition calling for a 20-minute daily recess for K–fifth graders that could not be taken away as punishment. We circulated it online and at community events. We created a Facebook page and invited those who agreed to “like” our page. We did our research and made handouts chock-full with facts on how recess contributes to learning and promotes mental health—along with cutesy graphics to make the flyers more attractive.

With 1,400 signatures and the retirement of the former superintendent, we felt the climate had shifted in our favor, so Jackson asked again for a meeting—and got it.

The new superintendent smiled, shook hands, and agreed to the benefits of daily recess. My husband and the two others who were at that meeting returned with what they thought was good news. My daughter literally jumped on her bed for joy. “I’ll be able to talk to my friends now,” she said.

But come August, my daughter came home and frowned: “No recess.” Sure enough, recess had only been recommended , not required. That school year, she had recess maybe once a month.

Now, a couple qualifications here. First, the decisions made by the superintendent’s office in the end were behind closed doors. (When I reached out in the course of writing this essay, to find out more about this process, they acknowledged receipt of the email but did not comment.) So, I can only speculate on what happened based on the limited knowledge I have. Second, I don’t want to make this another story about how backward Alabama is. I have a genuine love for Mobile and witness on a daily basis many people who have dedicated their lives to change the structural systems that lead to endemic poverty, crime, and discrimination of all kinds.

What happened in Mobile is emblematic of a national problem more than a regional one. As one of the parents in the group, Lisa Roddy, commented to me, “The diminishment of recess at school runs parallel to the diminishment of unsupervised play at home.” Indeed, my own childhood spent working in the garden to sell produce at the local farmers market and roaming the neighborhood with friends is something of the past, replaced by structured activities like team sports, day camps, online gaming—and mountains of homework.

The reasons behind the reduction of unstructured time stem from some profound social, cultural, and political shifts that occurred in the ’80s. A benchmark event often cited is the 1983 landmark education commission report that found American children to be lagging behind other developed nations—a finding that led to more standardized testing, increased homework loads, and tougher college admissions standards.

Another change was a restructuring of the tax system and reduction of federal student aid under the Reagan administration, which has placed a higher burden on families to pay for college. And one route to pay for the skyrocketing costs (Boston University now costs $90,000 a year, as Slate recently reported ) is for students to earn academic or athletic scholarships.

Increased media attention over some high-profile abductions such as Adam Walsh (which led to the creation of the TV show America’s Most Wanted and children’s faces appearing on milk cartons ) terrified caregivers in the ’80s. Also, the CDC began combining child abductions by strangers and noncustodial parents to calculate kidnapping rates, so that the potential risk appeared to skyrocket overnight. These fears created a cultural imperative to supervise children’s play every minute.

Some teachers told me in confidence that the ability to offer recess as a reward, to compel good student behavior, was simply too powerful of a tool to give up. I also suspect there are liability issues; principals didn’t want yet another reason for parents to call and complain about what someone said to someone on the playground. Because let’s be honest: Playgrounds can be fertile ground for bullying. (I know this well: When I was a second grader, I created a school paper where the front-page news consisted of who-kissed-who by the swing set and who-knocked-who off the slide.)

After my experience with recess advocacy, I’m seeing the solution being akin to what some are advocating to counter teens’ use of social media. We need governmental regulations to help the parents who are plugging holes in the dam. The problem of no recess is too entrenched in our culture at this point. Stephanie Jackson was well on her way to introduce a bill to the Alabama Legislature—and even had a potential sponsor. Then COVID hit, and progress stalled out.

While we didn’t achieve our immediate goals, positive change did occur. The 2019 Alabama Course of Study adopted our group’s language regarding recess. It states that “recess is a necessary break from the rigors of concentrated academic challenges” and that it is “inappropriate” for teachers to withhold recess as a “behavioral management tool.” These, however, were recommendations, rather than requirements. Since then, the Alabama PTA partnered with us and has taken up the charge. On the group’s page , one can find actionable items to promote recess in one’s own school district—and how to pass a recess-requirement bill. (Pictures of our group are posted there, too.) With today’s teen mental health crisis, it is more important than ever to examine unhealthy habits contributing to stress and anxiety, including those that may have started in elementary school.

This year, my daughter is in seventh grade. In fourth grade, we had to move schools to better serve her dyslexia. A bonus: The new school had recess. I asked her recently what it was like suddenly having recess, and she rolled her eyes, as kids her age will, and said: “That never made sense. I could focus so much better after I went outside.”

As we move into the college arms race, I have to remind myself I grew up with an abundance of chores and free time—and that has served me, not hindered me. As life becomes busier with the new school year, I am determined to ensure daily unstructured time for my daughter—time other than the minutes she spends with her nose pressed to the car window on our way to the next event. After all, we are raising children, not careers.

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Single headline Ofsted grades scrapped in landmark school reform

Government pushes ahead with reform agenda by scrapping single headline Ofsted judgements for schools with immediate effect

Single headline grades for schools will be scrapped with immediate effect to boost school standards and increase transparency for parents, the government has announced today.

Reductive single headline grades fail to provide a fair and accurate assessment of overall school performance across a range of areas and are supported by a minority of parents and teachers. 

The change delivers on the government’s mission to break down barriers to opportunity and demonstrates the Prime Minister’s commitment to improve the life chances of young people across the country.

For inspections this academic year, parents will see four grades across the existing sub-categories: quality of education, behaviour and attitudes, personal development and leadership & management.

This reform paves the way for the introduction of School Report Cards from September 2025, which will provide parents with a full and comprehensive assessment of how schools are performing and ensure that inspections are more effective in driving improvement. Recent data shows that reports cards are supported by 77% of parents.

The government will continue to intervene in poorly performing schools to ensure high school standards for children.

Bridget Phillipson, Education Secretary, said:

The need for Ofsted reform to drive high and rising standards for all our children in every school is overwhelmingly clear. The removal of headline grades is a generational reform and a landmark moment for children, parents, and teachers. Single headline grades are low information for parents and high stakes for schools. Parents deserve a much clearer, much broader picture of how schools are performing – that’s what our report cards will provide. This government will make inspection a more powerful, more transparent tool for driving school improvement. We promised change, and now we are delivering.

As part of today’s announcement, where schools are identified as struggling, government will prioritise rapidly getting plans in place to improve the education and experience of children, rather than relying purely on changing schools’ management.

From early 2025, the government will also introduce Regional Improvement Teams that will work with struggling schools to quickly and directly address areas of weakness, meeting a manifesto commitment.

The Education Secretary has already begun to reset relations with education workforces, supporting the Government’s pledge to recruit 6,500 new teachers, and reform to Ofsted marks another key milestone.

Today’s announcement follows engagement with the sector and family of headteacher Ruth Perry, after a coroner’s inquest found the Ofsted inspection process had contributed to her death.

The government will work closely with Ofsted and relevant sectors and stakeholders to ensure that the removal of headline grades is implemented smoothly.

Jason Elsom, Chief Executive of Parentkind, said:

We welcome the decision by the Secretary of State to prioritise Ofsted reform. The move to end single-word judgements as soon as practical, whilst giving due care and attention to constructing a new and sustainable accountability framework during the year ahead, is the right balance for both schools and parents.  Most parents understand the need for school inspection, but they want that inspection to help schools to improve as well as giving a verdict on the quality of education their children are receiving. When we spoke to parents about what was important to them, their children being happy at school was a big talking point and should not be overlooked. Parents have been very clear that they want to see changes to the way Ofsted reports back after visiting a school, and it is welcome to see a clear timetable being set out today for moving towards a report card that will give parents greater clarity of the performance of their children’s school. We need to make sure that we get this right for parents, as well as schools. There is much more we can do to include the voice of parents in Ofsted inspections and reform of our school system, and today’s announcement is a big step in the right direction.

Paul Whiteman, General Secretary of National Association of Headteachers, said:

The scrapping of overarching grades is a welcome interim measure. We have been clear that simplistic one-word judgements are harmful, and we are pleased the government has taken swift action to remove them. School leaders recognise the need for accountability but it must be proportionate and fair and so we are pleased to see a stronger focus on support for schools instead of heavy-handed intervention. There is much work to do now in order to design a fundamentally different long-term approach to inspection and we look forward to working with government to achieve that.

Where necessary, in cases of the most serious concern, government will continue to intervene, including by issuing an academy order, which may in some cases mean transferring to new management. Ofsted will continue to identify these schools – which would have been graded as inadequate.

The government also currently intervenes where a school receives two or more consecutive judgements of ‘requires improvement’ under the ‘2RI’ policy. With the exception of schools already due to convert to academies this term, this policy will change. The government will now put in place support for these schools from a high performing school, helping to drive up standards quickly.

Today’s changes build on the recently announced Children’s Wellbeing Bill, which will put children at the centre of education and make changes to ensure every child is supported to achieve and thrive.

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Where have all the children gone? Rise of homeschooling takes a transformative look on education

ROCHESTER, N.Y. — According to the Empire Center for Public Policy , families in New York state have flocked to home education at rates twice the national average. According to Skill Ademia in 2019, prior to remote learning, approximately 2.5 million students were homeschooled in the United States. This number has risen significantly, with estimates indicating that almost 4 million students are being homeschooled nationwide.  

To meet the needs of the community, Greece Public Library has been distributing updated homeschool kids providing supplemental materials for students' required curriculum. 

Being a parent can often be a handful, but for Léa Bouillon, she has chosen to wear many different hats; from being a mother of three, teaching French and English and even exploring classical music. 

They are lessons, Bouillon says, you would not typically find in your everyday classroom. 

“I'm an opera singer and I have a degree in French literature, so we focus on classical arts, classical music artists,” Bouillon said. “I try to maintain a balance between stretching them to something that is new and pointing them in a new direction, that they can really relate to.” 

Which is why Bouillon has brought the classroom to her own home.  

“What is wonderful about homeschooling is that you really get to think about your own education all over again and maybe reconsider your own strengths and weaknesses and how they can be improved,” Bouillon said. 

According to the Empire Center for Public Policy, families in New York state have flocked to home education at rates twice the national average. Bouillon and thousands of other families making the switch have made New York second in the nation for homeschooling growth. 

“Really choose a curriculum, to choose an education that is a little more specific to your children,” Bouillon said. “I wasn't homeschooled, so I don't know what I'm doing. So I think it used to be that there weren't a lot of resources for some parts of homeschooling. And now thankfully there are so many resources.” 

As public schools have seen the surge, so have their local libraries. Distributing  homeschool kits , Greece Public Library provides materials that cover a variety of topics. 

Librarian April Newman has spent over a year crafting materials for families like the Bouillons in hopes they are provided the proper supplemental materials. 

“The supplemental materials include music and art and STEM, Vocabulary, Spanish,” librarian April Newman said. “So it'll be things that people don't have in their home school curriculum, per se, but they want to have an add on because the curriculum for the home schools and the co-ops, they're not going to be including all subject matters sometime. So it's really helpful for the parents if we give them some new materials.” 

As families continue to show a growing interest in alternative learning models, Bouillon has found beauty in being her own teacher. 

“Just to be the one who gets to pour into your children and build this deep relationship with them is a real privilege,” Bouillon said. 

And she's finding the world to be the true classroom. 

Newsletter: Giving high school students options besides college

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Good morning. It is Wednesday, Aug. 28, and we’re in the last week before the unofficial end of summer. Here’s what’s happening in Opinion.

Editorial Writer Karin Klein has covered education for years and watching the Democratic National Convention last week, she picked up on a new theme from party leaders. They were talking a lot more about the need to create well-paid careers for people who don’t obtain a bachelor’s degree. She wrote about this in the recent editorial The idea that success does not require a college degree gets space on DNC stage, and I asked her to share more insight with newsletter readers. Below are her answers.

What’s changed in the rhetoric on college?

For a long time, Democratic leadership was pushing the “college for everyone” movement. In 2009, former President Obama vowed that “by 2020, this nation will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.” The idea at the time, part of a push by former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, was that the country would lose some kind of global jobs war with other countries. Gates said we would be short 11 million skilled workers if vast numbers of students weren’t added to the college rolls.

Consider, close to 40% of Cal State students don’t get a bachelor’s degree within six years More than 40% of four-year college grads are underemployed — working in jobs that really don’t need a degree. Americans were seeing this and rightly questioning whether so many people needed a degree, especially given the unsolved student debt question. They were ignored for too long and now they are being heard. It was remarkable to hear Obama say during the DNC, “College shouldn’t be the only ticket to the middle class.”

You recently wrote a book about this called “Rethinking College: A Guide to Thriving Without a Degree.” Why did you decide to write about this?

No one is helping students who don’t want or aren’t ready to go to college figure out their next step. I wanted to help young people (or older people) who are thinking, “I don’t really want to go for a bachelor’s degree, but I don’t know what I can do without one or what kinds of work are available and how I would go about getting them.” I’m filling what I call the “guidance gap” at high schools.

My goal is to inspire this group of students to know that they don’t have to take the conventional high-school-straight-to-college route and that following the path that’s right for them as individuals is as admirable as going to college. And to give them helpful, specific information about the many career possibilities open to them.

School counselors are pressured to get students into college — not to mention that most of them have too heavy a load to tailor their advice to individual needs. Beyond college, they mostly have two things to suggest: the skilled trades such as welding, or joining the military. Both of those are valid options and are in my book, but counselors aren’t aware of how much more there is or how students can link up to the job world. Just to name a few, there are the creative fields, entrepreneurialism, travel and outdoor work, white-collar apprenticeships, plus companies and governments that have dropped degree requirements for many professional jobs.

Why is this an important conversation now, and what else should we be talking about in terms of jobs and college?

Obviously, student debt is a big one. Our current model of on-campus, finish-in-four-years college isn’t working well for too many people. This doesn’t call for tweaking but for some wholesale changes. Most people are surprised to learn that nearly 30% of community college grads out-earn the average holder of a bachelor’s degree, and that 59% of people who went to college because they were pressured into it or didn’t know what else to do end up saying college was a waste.

In truth, our way of education is too narrowly focused, too irrelevant to student lives and their diverse talents. And, strangely, it is too performative and not focused enough on the love of learning that should be a lifelong pursuit and pleasure whether someone goes to college or not.

The ideas in Project 2025? Reagan tried them, and the nation suffered . The Heritage Foundation’s 1981 publication “The Mandate for Leadership” helped shape President Reagan’s policy framework, writes Joel Edward Goza, a professor of ethics at Simmons College of Kentucky. “If today’s economic inequality, racial unrest and environmental degradation represent some of our greatest political challenges, we would do well to remember that Reagan and the Heritage Foundation were the preeminent engineers of these catastrophes.”

Ignore my brother Bobby, Max Kennedy says . “Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I would be motivated to write something of this nature,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s brother writes after the independent candidate ended his presidential campaign and endorsed Donald Trump. “Trump was exactly the kind of arrogant, entitled bully my father used to prosecute.”

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Parole consideration for those sentenced to life behind bars 35 years ago? It’s the right thing to do. Senate Bill 94 is a reasonable proposal to allow sentence review for several hundred aging California prisoners who were sent to prison for life without parole before 1990. “Pragmatism and a measured sense of justice, rather than sympathy, are the rationales for this bill,” The Times’ editorial board writes. “There is diminishing value in continuing to imprison people for violent crimes they committed long ago when they were young and stupid.”

Trump keeps flip-flopping on abortion. American women are so over it. Columnist LZ Granderson looks at how Donald Trump’s position on abortion changes for political expediency. “In 2022, he crowed about what his Supreme Court had done. Now it’s 2024, and he’s struggling to meet younger women at the polls, so he’s back to making empty promises.”

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• Robin Abcarian: 17-year-old Gus Walz uttered the Democratic National Convention’s three most memorable words
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• November election could make — or break — reproductive freedom
• Why the rush? Hasty L.A. school bond vote leaves many questions unanswered

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• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fact-checking-warnings-from-democrats-about-project-2025-and-donald-trump

Fact-checking warnings from Democrats about Project 2025 and Donald Trump

This fact check originally appeared on PolitiFact .

Project 2025 has a starring role in this week’s Democratic National Convention.

And it was front and center on Night 1.

WATCH: Hauling large copy of Project 2025, Michigan state Sen. McMorrow speaks at 2024 DNC

“This is Project 2025,” Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, D-Royal Oak, said as she laid a hardbound copy of the 900-page document on the lectern. “Over the next four nights, you are going to hear a lot about what is in this 900-page document. Why? Because this is the Republican blueprint for a second Trump term.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has warned Americans about “Trump’s Project 2025” agenda — even though former President Donald Trump doesn’t claim the conservative presidential transition document.

“Donald Trump wants to take our country backward,” Harris said July 23 in Milwaukee. “He and his extreme Project 2025 agenda will weaken the middle class. Like, we know we got to take this seriously, and can you believe they put that thing in writing?”

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate, has joined in on the talking point.

“Don’t believe (Trump) when he’s playing dumb about this Project 2025. He knows exactly what it’ll do,” Walz said Aug. 9 in Glendale, Arizona.

Trump’s campaign has worked to build distance from the project, which the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, led with contributions from dozens of conservative groups.

Much of the plan calls for extensive executive-branch overhauls and draws on both long-standing conservative principles, such as tax cuts, and more recent culture war issues. It lays out recommendations for disbanding the Commerce and Education departments, eliminating certain climate protections and consolidating more power to the president.

Project 2025 offers a sweeping vision for a Republican-led executive branch, and some of its policies mirror Trump’s 2024 agenda, But Harris and her presidential campaign have at times gone too far in describing what the project calls for and how closely the plans overlap with Trump’s campaign.

PolitiFact researched Harris’ warnings about how the plan would affect reproductive rights, federal entitlement programs and education, just as we did for President Joe Biden’s Project 2025 rhetoric. Here’s what the project does and doesn’t call for, and how it squares with Trump’s positions.

Are Trump and Project 2025 connected?

To distance himself from Project 2025 amid the Democratic attacks, Trump wrote on Truth Social that he “knows nothing” about it and has “no idea” who is in charge of it. (CNN identified at least 140 former advisers from the Trump administration who have been involved.)

The Heritage Foundation sought contributions from more than 100 conservative organizations for its policy vision for the next Republican presidency, which was published in 2023.

Project 2025 is now winding down some of its policy operations, and director Paul Dans, a former Trump administration official, is stepping down, The Washington Post reported July 30. Trump campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita denounced the document.

WATCH: A look at the Project 2025 plan to reshape government and Trump’s links to its authors

However, Project 2025 contributors include a number of high-ranking officials from Trump’s first administration, including former White House adviser Peter Navarro and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson.

A recently released recording of Russell Vought, a Project 2025 author and the former director of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, showed Vought saying Trump’s “very supportive of what we do.” He said Trump was only distancing himself because Democrats were making a bogeyman out of the document.

Project 2025 wouldn’t ban abortion outright, but would curtail access

The Harris campaign shared a graphic on X that claimed “Trump’s Project 2025 plan for workers” would “go after birth control and ban abortion nationwide.”

The plan doesn’t call to ban abortion nationwide, though its recommendations could curtail some contraceptives and limit abortion access.

What’s known about Trump’s abortion agenda neither lines up with Harris’ description nor Project 2025’s wish list.

Project 2025 says the Department of Health and Human Services Department should “return to being known as the Department of Life by explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is health care.”

It recommends that the Food and Drug Administration reverse its 2000 approval of mifepristone, the first pill taken in a two-drug regimen for a medication abortion. Medication is the most common form of abortion in the U.S. — accounting for around 63 percent in 2023.

If mifepristone were to remain approved, Project 2025 recommends new rules, such as cutting its use from 10 weeks into pregnancy to seven. It would have to be provided to patients in person — part of the group’s efforts to limit access to the drug by mail. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a legal challenge to mifepristone’s FDA approval over procedural grounds.

WATCH: Trump’s plans for health care and reproductive rights if he returns to White House The manual also calls for the Justice Department to enforce the 1873 Comstock Act on mifepristone, which bans the mailing of “obscene” materials. Abortion access supporters fear that a strict interpretation of the law could go further to ban mailing the materials used in procedural abortions, such as surgical instruments and equipment.

The plan proposes withholding federal money from states that don’t report to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention how many abortions take place within their borders. The plan also would prohibit abortion providers, such as Planned Parenthood, from receiving Medicaid funds. It also calls for the Department of Health and Human Services to ensure that the training of medical professionals, including doctors and nurses, omits abortion training.

The document says some forms of emergency contraception — particularly Ella, a pill that can be taken within five days of unprotected sex to prevent pregnancy — should be excluded from no-cost coverage. The Affordable Care Act requires most private health insurers to cover recommended preventive services, which involves a range of birth control methods, including emergency contraception.

Trump has recently said states should decide abortion regulations and that he wouldn’t block access to contraceptives. Trump said during his June 27 debate with Biden that he wouldn’t ban mifepristone after the Supreme Court “approved” it. But the court rejected the lawsuit based on standing, not the case’s merits. He has not weighed in on the Comstock Act or said whether he supports it being used to block abortion medication, or other kinds of abortions.

Project 2025 doesn’t call for cutting Social Security, but proposes some changes to Medicare

“When you read (Project 2025),” Harris told a crowd July 23 in Wisconsin, “you will see, Donald Trump intends to cut Social Security and Medicare.”

The Project 2025 document does not call for Social Security cuts. None of its 10 references to Social Security addresses plans for cutting the program.

Harris also misleads about Trump’s Social Security views.

In his earlier campaigns and before he was a politician, Trump said about a half-dozen times that he’s open to major overhauls of Social Security, including cuts and privatization. More recently, in a March 2024 CNBC interview, Trump said of entitlement programs such as Social Security, “There’s a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting.” However, he quickly walked that statement back, and his CNBC comment stands at odds with essentially everything else Trump has said during the 2024 presidential campaign.

Trump’s campaign website says that not “a single penny” should be cut from Social Security. We rated Harris’ claim that Trump intends to cut Social Security Mostly False.

Project 2025 does propose changes to Medicare, including making Medicare Advantage, the private insurance offering in Medicare, the “default” enrollment option. Unlike Original Medicare, Medicare Advantage plans have provider networks and can also require prior authorization, meaning that the plan can approve or deny certain services. Original Medicare plans don’t have prior authorization requirements.

The manual also calls for repealing health policies enacted under Biden, such as the Inflation Reduction Act. The law enabled Medicare to negotiate with drugmakers for the first time in history, and recently resulted in an agreement with drug companies to lower the prices of 10 expensive prescriptions for Medicare enrollees.

Trump, however, has said repeatedly during the 2024 presidential campaign that he will not cut Medicare.

Project 2025 would eliminate the Education Department, which Trump supports

The Harris campaign said Project 2025 would “eliminate the U.S. Department of Education” — and that’s accurate. Project 2025 says federal education policy “should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated.” The plan scales back the federal government’s role in education policy and devolves the functions that remain to other agencies.

Aside from eliminating the department, the project also proposes scrapping the Biden administration’s Title IX revision, which prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. It also would let states opt out of federal education programs and calls for passing a federal parents’ bill of rights similar to ones passed in some Republican-led state legislatures.

Republicans, including Trump, have pledged to close the department, which gained its status in 1979 within Democratic President Jimmy Carter’s presidential Cabinet.

In one of his Agenda 47 policy videos, Trump promised to close the department and “to send all education work and needs back to the states.” Eliminating the department would have to go through Congress.

What Project 2025, Trump would do on overtime pay

In the graphic, the Harris campaign says Project 2025 allows “employers to stop paying workers for overtime work.”

The plan doesn’t call for banning overtime wages. It recommends changes to some Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, regulations and to overtime rules. Some changes, if enacted, could result in some people losing overtime protections, experts told us.

The document proposes that the Labor Department maintain an overtime threshold “that does not punish businesses in lower-cost regions (e.g., the southeast United States).” This threshold is the amount of money executive, administrative or professional employees need to make for an employer to exempt them from overtime pay under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

In 2019, the Trump’s administration finalized a rule that expanded overtime pay eligibility to most salaried workers earning less than about $35,568, which it said made about 1.3 million more workers eligible for overtime pay. The Trump-era threshold is high enough to cover most line workers in lower-cost regions, Project 2025 said.

The Biden administration raised that threshold to $43,888 beginning July 1, and that will rise to $58,656 on Jan. 1, 2025. That would grant overtime eligibility to about 4 million workers, the Labor Department said.

It’s unclear how many workers Project 2025’s proposal to return to the Trump-era overtime threshold in some parts of the country would affect, but experts said some would presumably lose the right to overtime wages.

Other overtime proposals in Project 2025’s plan include allowing some workers to choose to accumulate paid time off instead of overtime pay, or to work more hours in one week and fewer in the next, rather than receive overtime.

Trump’s past with overtime pay is complicated. In 2016, the Obama administration said it would raise the overtime to salaried workers earning less than $47,476 a year, about double the exemption level set in 2004 of $23,660 a year.

But when a judge blocked the Obama rule, the Trump administration didn’t challenge the court ruling. Instead it set its own overtime threshold, which raised the amount, but by less than Obama.

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Blog The Education Hub

https://educationhub.blog.gov.uk/2024/08/20/gcse-results-day-2024-number-grading-system/

GCSE results day 2024: Everything you need to know including the number grading system

Thousands of students across the country will soon be finding out their GCSE results and thinking about the next steps in their education.   

Here we explain everything you need to know about the big day, from when results day is, to the current 9-1 grading scale, to what your options are if your results aren’t what you’re expecting.  

When is GCSE results day 2024?  

GCSE results day will be taking place on Thursday the 22 August.     

The results will be made available to schools on Wednesday and available to pick up from your school by 8am on Thursday morning.  

Schools will issue their own instructions on how and when to collect your results.   

When did we change to a number grading scale?  

The shift to the numerical grading system was introduced in England in 2017 firstly in English language, English literature, and maths.  

By 2020 all subjects were shifted to number grades. This means anyone with GCSE results from 2017-2020 will have a combination of both letters and numbers.  

The numerical grading system was to signal more challenging GCSEs and to better differentiate between students’ abilities - particularly at higher grades between the A *-C grades. There only used to be 4 grades between A* and C, now with the numerical grading scale there are 6.  

What do the number grades mean?  

The grades are ranked from 1, the lowest, to 9, the highest.  

The grades don’t exactly translate, but the two grading scales meet at three points as illustrated below.  

The bottom of grade 7 is aligned with the bottom of grade A, while the bottom of grade 4 is aligned to the bottom of grade C.    

Meanwhile, the bottom of grade 1 is aligned to the bottom of grade G.  

What to do if your results weren’t what you were expecting?  

If your results weren’t what you were expecting, firstly don’t panic. You have options.  

First things first, speak to your school or college – they could be flexible on entry requirements if you’ve just missed your grades.   

They’ll also be able to give you the best tailored advice on whether re-sitting while studying for your next qualifications is a possibility.   

If you’re really unhappy with your results you can enter to resit all GCSE subjects in summer 2025. You can also take autumn exams in GCSE English language and maths.  

Speak to your sixth form or college to decide when it’s the best time for you to resit a GCSE exam.  

Look for other courses with different grade requirements     

Entry requirements vary depending on the college and course. Ask your school for advice, and call your college or another one in your area to see if there’s a space on a course you’re interested in.    

Consider an apprenticeship    

Apprenticeships combine a practical training job with study too. They’re open to you if you’re 16 or over, living in England, and not in full time education.  

As an apprentice you’ll be a paid employee, have the opportunity to work alongside experienced staff, gain job-specific skills, and get time set aside for training and study related to your role.   

You can find out more about how to apply here .  

Talk to a National Careers Service (NCS) adviser    

The National Career Service is a free resource that can help you with your career planning. Give them a call to discuss potential routes into higher education, further education, or the workplace.   

Whatever your results, if you want to find out more about all your education and training options, as well as get practical advice about your exam results, visit the  National Careers Service page  and Skills for Careers to explore your study and work choices.   

You may also be interested in:

• Results day 2024: What's next after picking up your A level, T level and VTQ results?
• When is results day 2024? GCSEs, A levels, T Levels and VTQs

Tags: GCSE grade equivalent , gcse number grades , GCSE results , gcse results day 2024 , gsce grades old and new , new gcse grades

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Guest Essay

I Swore Off Air-Conditioning, and You Can, Too

By Stan Cox

Mr. Cox lives in Salina, Kan., and is the author of “Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World.”

Whenever people ask me how my wife and I have endured 25 Kansas summers almost entirely without air-conditioning, I like to say we do it because air-conditioning makes it too hot outside. We’re not ascetics, Luddites or misers; we just want to keep living comfortably, indoors and out.

It’s not just that air-conditioning is making our summers even hotter. (On a sweltering night in a city like Houston, the hot air that A.C. units blast out over the streets can raise outdoor temperatures up to three or four degrees.) It’s also that air-conditioning has altered the way most Americans experience heat.

Our bodies have grown so accustomed to climate-controlled indoor spaces, set at a chilly 69 degrees, that anything else can feel unbearable. And the greenhouse gases created by the roughly 90 percent of American households that own A.C. units mean that running them even in balmy temperatures is making the climate crisis worse.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that anyone switch the air off in the middle of a heat wave. Year in and year out, heat waves kill more people than any other type of natural disaster. If you live in Miami or Phoenix, you need air-conditioning to survive the summer. But if you live in the middle of the country, try leaving the air-conditioning off when it’s hot but not too hot.

Our species evolved, biologically and culturally, under wildly varying climatic conditions, and we haven’t lost that ability to adapt. Research suggests that when we spend more time in warm or hot summer weather, we can start feeling comfortable at temperatures that once felt insufferable. That’s the key to reducing dependence on air-conditioning: The less you use it, the easier it is to live without it.

When I was growing up in Georgia, my family moved into our first air-conditioned house when I was 12, and I loved it. But I left home for college in the 1970s, and I’ve lived mostly without A.C. ever since.

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Switching Schools: Reconsidering the Relationship Between School Mobility and High School Dropout

Joseph gasper.

Westat, 1600 Research Blvd. Rockville, MD 20850, (240) 314-2485, (301) 610-4905

Stefanie DeLuca

JHU Department of Sociology, 532 Mergenthaler Hall, 3400. N. Charles St. Baltimore, MD 21218, (410) 516-7629, (410) 516-7590

Angela Estacion

JHU Department of Sociology, 533 Mergenthaler Hall, 3400. N. Charles St. Baltimore, MD 21218, (410) 516-7626, (410) 516-7590

Youth who switch schools are more likely to demonstrate a wide array of negative behavioral and educational outcomes, including dropping out of high school. However, whether switching schools actually puts youth at risk for dropout is uncertain, since youth who switch schools are similar to dropouts in their levels of prior school achievement and engagement, which suggests that switching schools may be part of the same long-term developmental process of disengagement that leads to dropping out. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, this study uses propensity score matching to pair youth who switched high schools with similar youth who stayed in the same school. We find that while over half the association between switching schools and dropout is explained by observed characteristics prior to 9 th grade, switching schools is still associated with dropout. Moreover, the relationship between switching schools and dropout varies depending on a youth's propensity for switching schools.

Graduating from high school is an important developmental task that marks the transition out of adolescence and into adulthood. However, recent statistics suggest that as few as two thirds of youth graduate within four years of entering high school, and that the odds of graduating from high school for black and Hispanic youth barely break 50/50 ( Greene & Winters, 2006 ; Miao & Haney, 2004 ; Swanson & Chaplin, 2003 ). 1 High school dropouts are likely to face a number of problems, both immediately after dropping out and later in life. Nearly one half of all high school dropouts ages 16 to 24 are jobless ( Sum et al., 2003 ), and high school dropouts earn about $9,245 less per year than high school graduates ( Doland, 2001 ). Additionally, nearly half of all heads of households on welfare ( Schwartz, 1995 ) and nearly two thirds of prison inmates have not received a high school diploma ( Harlow, 2003 ). Moreover, the costs of dropping out of high school and its associated ills fall not only on the individual high school dropout, but on the rest of society. It is estimated that the lifetime cost to the nation is $260,000 per dropout ( Rouse, 2005 ).

One factor that is believed to put youth at risk for dropping out of high school is switching schools for reasons other than promotion from one grade to the next, e.g., from elementary school to middle school or from middle school to high school ( Astone & McLanahan, 1994 ; Haveman, Wolfe, & Spaulding, 1991 ; Rumberger, 1995 ; Rumberger & Larson, 1998 ; South, Haynie, & Bose, 2007 ; Swanson & Schneider, 1999 ; Teachman, Paasch, & Carver, 1996 ). Indeed, switching schools is so strongly associated with dropping out that one study found that the majority of high school dropouts switched schools at least once, while the majority of high school graduates did not ( Rumberger & Larson, 1998 ). Moreover, the relationship between switching schools and high school dropout appears to be robust to controls for prior academic achievement and student background characteristics ( Rumberger & Larson, 1998 ; South, Haynie, & Bose, 2007 ).

However, whether switching schools actually causes students to dropout is uncertain. A few studies have documented that youth who switch schools resemble high school dropouts on several academic, family, and personal factors. Most notably, youth who switch schools are more likely to come from single parent families, are more disengaged, and perform worse academically than youth who do not switch schools, as evidenced by their higher rate of absenteeism, lower grades, and more frequent school suspension and delinquency ( Lee & Burkam, 1992 ; Rumberger & Larson, 1998 ). In addition, several studies that have examined the effects of switching schools on youth outcomes have found that much of the difference in achievement or problem behavior between youth who switch schools and those who do not disappears once socioeconomic background and prior achievement are taken into account ( Gasper, DeLuca, & Estacion, 2010 ; Pribesh & Downey, 1999 ; Temple & Reynolds, 1999 ). Taken together, these findings suggest that the apparent effects of school mobility on dropout may have little to do with school mobility and more to do with earlier school performance, family instability and other social or emotional factors. Since dropping out is thought to be the result of a long-term process of disengagement from school, one that begins as early as first grade ( Alexander, Entwisle, & Kabbani, 2001 ; Ensminger & Slusarcick, 1992 ; Finn, 1989 ), switching schools may simply be one point along a continuum of gradual withdrawal from school that ultimately ends with dropping out. It is therefore difficult to know whether mobility is a cause of dropout, or merely a symptom of the underlying process of disengagement that causes dropout.

The possibility that switching schools may be caused by the same cycle of disengagement that leads to dropout makes estimating the effect of switching schools on dropout a difficult task, due to selection bias. Since the factors that lead to dropout begin operating as early as first grade, youth who switch high schools are likely to be very different from youth who stay in the same high school in terms of their socioeconomic background, school performance, and behavior long before entering 9 th grade. The main challenge therefore lies in knowing the unobserved counterfactual outcome—would the same youth have dropped out if they had not switched schools? Without experimental data, treated youth (who switched schools) must be compared to untreated youth (who stayed in the same school) who are similar on all background factors predictive of dropping out (both observed and unobserved). Such comparisons would provide better estimates than prior research of the effect of switching schools on dropout.

It is also possible that the effect of a transition such as school mobility works differently across youth, depending on their initial risk (propensity) for changing schools. In other words, it is plausible that the youth most at risk for a non-promotional school change would be most affected by that change, as it becomes one more jolt to an already unstable set of family circumstances, a history of poor school performance, and a tendency toward problem behaviors. The literature on repeat residential mobility suggests that all of the disruptions in the lives of very poor youth have cumulative negative effects ( Shafft, 2006 ). At the other extreme, it is possible that youth who are the least likely to switch schools come from more stable and higher functioning families and have enough personal resources to weather the storm of a school change. For students in the middle of the risk continuum, a school change might be the event that pushes a student over the edge if he or she is ‘making it’ but coming from a fragile family or struggling socially. Therefore, we also consider the possibility that the effect of a school change varies by student's risk for experiencing the event.

In this study, we seek to determine whether switching high schools leads to dropping out, or whether high school mobility is simply a precursor to dropping out. To do this, we use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97), sponsored by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Designed to examine the educational and labor market experiences of youth, the NLSY97 contains richly descriptive information on youth's school enrollment, including the grade level of each school that a youth attended. In order to assess whether switching schools increases the likelihood of dropout, we use propensity score matching techniques to compare youth who switched high schools (switchers) with youth who stayed in the same high school (stayers) but who are similar on 177 characteristics measured before 9th grade. We consider a wide variety of background factors that may predispose youth to switching high schools or dropping out, including: demographics, socioeconomic background, family processes and dynamics, school performance and engagement, substance use and precocious transitions, and delinquency. By ensuring that youth who switched high schools are similar to youth who stayed in the same high school on all of these observed background characteristics, we can provide a better estimate than prior research of the relationship between switching schools and dropout. We then assess whether switching high schools has the same effect on youth who had a high propensity for switching compared to those with a low propensity. This allows us to determine whether switching schools leads to dropping out, and for which kinds of students.

Prior Research and Theory

Extent of school mobility.

While most youth do not experience much disruption in their school environments, a nontrivial number do end up changing schools outside of a normal promotion transition point (e.g. the transition from elementary to middle school at 6 th grade) (National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, 2010). Over 30 percent of elementary school students make more than one school change between 1 st and 8 th grade ( Smith, 1995 ), and more than 25 percent of students make a non-promotional school change between grades 8 and 12 ( Rumberger & Larson, 1998 ). However, the extent to which students experience mobility varies closely with socioeconomic characteristics ( Hanushek, Kain, & Rivkin, 2004 ). For example, studies focusing on very poor minority families suggest that between sixty and seventy percent of these children change schools at least once in elementary grades and 20 percent change schools two or more times ( Temple & Reynolds, 1999 ).

Most studies focus on the effects of residential mobility on youth developmental outcomes rather than school mobility per se ( Astone & McLanahan, 1994 ; Hagan, Macmillan, & Wheaton, 1996 ; Haveman, Wolfe, & Spaulding, 1991 ). This makes sense, as residential mobility is often accompanied by school change and is the most common cause for school mobility. However, residential and school moves are not always linked, since only 50-60% of school changes are residential ( Kerbow, 1996 ). Therefore, we study the impacts of school mobility on educational outcomes, independent of residential mobility, to understand the direct links between switching educational environments and the chances that a student will drop out of school.

School Mobility Causes Dropout

Recent studies investigating mobility and school outcomes have drawn most heavily from Coleman's (1988) work on social capital theory ( Hagan, Macmillan, & Wheaton, 1996 ; Pribesh & Downey, 1999 ; Ream, 2005a ). Coleman's seminal work suggests that students who change schools as a result of moving are more likely to experience high school dropout in part because of the loss of important social ties (1988; 1990). In particular, he argues that mobility is significant because it affects three forms of closure: parents are less likely to know the teachers in a new school; parents are less likely to know the parents of the child's new classmates; and the child is less likely to know the parents of other youth in the school (1990:596). These relationships are significant for understanding educational attainment, mental health and whether youth engage in delinquent behaviors ( Briggs, 1997 , 1998 ; Coleman, 1988 ; Hagan, Macmillan, & Wheaton, 1996 ; Pribesh & Downey, 1999 ). Additional work has confirmed that the effects of mobility on schooling outcomes is in part due to the loss of relationships with school personnel, parents and peers ( McLanahan & Booth, 1989 ; Pribesh & Downey, 1999 ; South, Haynie, & Bose, 2007 ).

Social capital within families is important for educational attainment because under stable conditions, parents can monitor children's school progress and provide educational guidance. However, moving can disrupt routines, affect parental relationships and also limit the extent to which parents can rely on social networks to gain knowledge about local school quality and the availability of educational programs and services. It is theorized that breaking social ties and disrupting the home environment creates psychological stress for adolescents and deprives both families and young people of the resources that established social connections bring ( Hagan, Macmillan, & Wheaton, 1996 ; Kroger, 1980 ).

Changing schools can affect educational achievement in many other ways. In addition to severing relationships between children and local neighborhood adults (and breaking ties between parents and the parents of their children's friends), changing schools alters important connections to teachers, peers and extracurricular opportunities and can disrupt instructional practices. For example, when children switch schools, it takes time for the schools to acquire student records and teachers have to get to know students, which can be difficult after the school year has already begun. There may also a discontinuity in learning environments, goals, and assessments between the old and new school. This can make it difficult to catch up on coursework both because students have to learn about the new expectations for academic performance and behavior at the school, but also because students may miss learning about key concepts in the time lost between transitions ( Kerbow, Azcoitia, & Buell, 2003 ).

The social transitions between schools can also be difficult for young people, as they enter new landscapes with well developed friend networks and cliques. This can be difficult for transfer students as, by virtue of being ‘unknown’, they have no entrée into the social hierarchy of the school ( Eckert, 1989 ; Eder, 1985 ). Previous research has found that more mobile adolescents tend to be more socially isolated and less involved in extracurricular activities than non-mobile adolescents ( Pribesh & Downey, 1999 ), which may lead to weak academic performance, lowered educational aspirations, and less commitment to and satisfaction with school.

Switching Schools as a Symptom of Disengagement

The argument that switching schools and dropout are instead based on similar underlying factors (rather than the former simply causing the latter) has received much less attention. However, when situated in a broader perspective on dropout, switching schools can be viewed more as a sign of impending school attrition than as a cause of dropout. Finn (1989) developed two models that view dropout as a long-term developmental process of disengagement from school. Finn's first model, the frustration-self-esteem model, argues that poor school performance leads to frustration and low self-esteem, which causes a youth to reject school, which they view as the source of their negative feelings. This school rejection may take the form of problem behavior, if a student seeks an increase in self-esteem through success in another arena—specifically, rebellious behavior. Problem behavior escalates and negatively affects school performance until the student eventually drops out, is expelled or the student's parents transfer her to a different school in an attempt to remedy the problem.

Whereas the frustration-self-esteem model focuses on internal psychological processes, Finn's (1989) second model of dropout—the participation-identification model—emphasizes a youth's behavioral and emotional involvement with school. According to this model, students who fail to develop a sense of identification with school will drop out. The development of a sense of identification stems from participation in classroom and school activities, which fosters academic success, promotes a sense of belonging and the value of school-related goals, and increases future involvement in school. The failure to participate in these activities leads to poor academic performance, a lack of support and encouragement to continue participating in school, and emotional withdrawal from school. As the student gets older, attempts at withdrawal manifest themselves as problem behavior, including truancy and disruptive behavior. As the attention of teachers and school officials becomes focused on the problem behavior, and as suspensions and other disciplinary practices prevent the student from further participating in school activities, dropping out is likely.

There is some empirical evidence for the claim that switching schools is caused by the same cycle of disengagement that causes dropout. Lee and Burkam (1992) examined the causes of dropping out, transferring, and graduating. They found that the predictors of dropping out were similar to those of transferring, including frequent unexcused absences, low grades, dissatisfaction with and disinterest in school, cutting classes, suspension/probation, and trouble with the law. They concluded that the motivations for school transfer—or “dropping down”-- were similar to those for dropping out and that transferring schools is one point along a continuum of school attrition which ends in dropout. Whereas transferring schools represents dissatisfaction and problems in a single school, dropping out represents dissatisfaction more globally. Similarly, Rumberger and Larson (1998) found that academic and behavioral disengagement in 8 th grade (including absenteeism, misbehavior, and low expectations) predicted both whether students dropped out or transferred schools between the 8 th and 12th grades.

A second source of evidence comes from studies that find that the association between school transfer and achievement and dropout is reduced when controls for preexisting background characteristics are introduced. Using data from a panel of low-income black children in Chicago, Temple and Reynolds (1999) found that while children who moved frequently between kindergarten and 7 th grade performed nearly one grade level behind their peers in reading and mathematics in 7 th grade, one half of this difference was due to the fact that they had lower achievement before they started to change schools. Pribesh and Downey (1999) found that preexisting differences accounted for 90 percent of the difference in test scores between movers and non-movers. From this, they conclude that “Movers perform less well in school than non-movers in large part because the kinds of families that tend to move are also likely to have other disadvantages” (531).

Differences in the Effect of Switching Schools

Because of the variation in family background, social networks and previous academic performance that characterizes the differences between youth who change schools and those who do not, it is also likely that school switching has different effects on youth who vary along these dimensions. Most experimental work estimates an ‘average treatment effect’ that shows how an intervention changed the average outcomes for those in the treatment group as compared to average outcomes for controls. However, this ignores the fact that individuals respond differently to treatments, depending on their own characteristics, whether they complied with treatment and treatment fidelity ( Morgan & Winship, 2007 ). Thus, not all young people will respond to school mobility the same way, even if on average it seems to matter for the population.

School mobility might affect youth differently, depending on how their observable and unobservable characteristics and life circumstances put them at risk for the event. A school transfer might trigger a process of withdrawal and distress for a student, depending whether the school change occurs alongside other important events, such as family structure changes or significant events occurring in other domains of a youth's life, such as previous poor school performance, friendship dynamics and puberty ( Agnew, 1992 ; Pearlin, Meneghan, Lieberman, & Mullen, 1981 ; Raviv, Keinan, Abazon, & Raviv, 1990 ; Simons & Blyth, 1987 ). The extent to which the student is experiencing instability at home might also condition whether or not a school change leads to dropout, even for a student who performs well academically. For example, research generally finds that higher mobility rates among children of divorced families or stepfamilies can help explain their lower educational attainment ( McLanahan & Sandefur, 1994 ; South, Crowder, & Trent, 1998 ; Speare & Goldscheider, 1987 ). Good relationships with parents or other adults might act as buffers to offset the effects of moving and school changes ( Hagan, Macmillan, & Wheaton, 1996 ). Research on risk and resilience implies that some protective factors (like parents and schools) can help individuals respond to stressful situations and enhance their coping abilities ( Jarrett, 1997 ; Rutter, 1987 ).

Youth's own personal characteristics and behavioral past might interact with the school change in a way that determines whether that transition leads to dropout. If youth have a tendency to be more popular with peers and make friends easily, a school change might not make much of a difference. However, if a student has had problem behaviors in the past, encountering new teachers and peers could trigger underlying tendencies to act out and lead to more withdrawal or disciplinary action. For example, a recent study of poor youth shows that the effects of changing neighborhoods differs by gender, prior engagement in risky behavior and neighborhood type ( Bolland et al., 2009 ).

It is also possible that school mobility comes about as a ‘strategic’ versus ‘reactive’ process, set in motion by parents and youth to find a better fit between the student and the school ( Ream, 2005b ; Rumberger, Larson, Ream, & Palardy, 1999 ). Reactive school changes are those brought about because of behavior problems the student might be having at school, changes in the family structure, the loss of a parent's job and other push factors at the school level. In the literature, most school mobility is perceived as reactive, and thus associated with negative developmental outcomes. However, some parents actively seek out a school change to pursue higher quality schooling environments for their children (e.g. enrolling children in private, magnet or charter schools). It is possible that such proactive school mobility could be more beneficial for youth than the reactive school moves and help explain how different students weather the storm of school switching better than others ( Ream, 2005b ; Rumberger, Larson, Ream, & Palardy, 1999 ).

Analytic Approach

Prior studies that have examined the effects of school transfer on dropout have relied on standard regression adjustment to address the problem of selection bias ( Rumberger & Larson, 1998 ; South, Haynie, & Bose, 2005 ; Swanson & Schneider, 1999 ). These studies all claim to find evidence of a detrimental effect of school transfer on high school graduation. However, standard regression adjustment may be inadequate for addressing selection bias for several reasons. First, regression relies heavily on model assumptions about functional form and extrapolates treatment effects even when treatment and control cases do not sufficiently overlap on observed characteristics. However, youth who transfer schools are likely to be different in important ways from youth who do not transfer schools. Regression adjustment ignores this lack of overlap of treatment and controls in its estimation of treatment effects. Such lack of overlap raises suspicions about what would have happened to youth who transferred schools if they had not transferred schools. Regression therefore reports an “average treatment effect” (ATE) of school transfer:

where y 1 denotes the probability of youth dropping out after transferring schools, and y 0 denotes the probability of a youth dropping out without transferring schools.

A better approach is to match youth who switched schools with youth who did not switch schools but who are similar on observed characteristics. When matching youth on many observed characteristics, one method that is particularly useful is propensity score matching, pioneered by Rosenbaum and Rubin (1983) . Propensity score matching combines information on a large number of observed characteristics into a single scale that summarizes a youth's probability of receiving treatment, which in this case is switching schools. Each treated case is matched to a control case with a similar probability or “propensity” for treatment based on observed characteristics.

Propensity score matching offers a substantial improvement over standard regression adjustment in two ways. First, propensity score matching does not rely on regression assumptions about additivity and linearity to estimate treatment effects. While an individual's propensity score is calculated using a logit or probit model, individuals are matched non-parametrically. Second, propensity score matching highlights the issue of common support. Matching forces researchers to examine the extent to which the treated and untreated groups overlap. It addresses the issue of selection bias by helping researchers get closer to the counterfactual question: If youth who switched schools had stayed in the same school, would they have graduated? Obviously, it is impossible to go back in time and redirect youth who transferred schools to stay in the same school. Propensity score matching helps to overcome this problem by comparing youth who transferred schools to youth with similar backgrounds who stayed in the same schools. Propensity score matching therefore reports an estimate of the “average treatment effect on the treated,” where Z is whether a youth switched high schools:

The first step in propensity score matching is to use a logit model to estimate the probability of treatment (non-promotional school change) given a set of observed characteristics:

where e xβ is the exponentiated logit or log odds of treatment and Z represents school mobility. The probability is restricted to be between 0 and 1. A key assumption of the propensity score method is the conditional independence assumption (CIA). The CIA states that selection into treatment is random conditional on a set of observed covariates. In other words, propensity score matching addresses “selection on observables” and cannot address selection bias on characteristics that are not measured or observed. If unobserved characteristics determine treatment status, then treatment assignment is not random and treated and control individuals still differ in important ways. While the CIA is a strong assumption that is unlikely to be satisfied in any observational study, we attempt to increase the plausibility of the CIA in two ways. First, we calculate propensity scores using 177 observed characteristics that are likely to affect both selection into treatment as well as the outcome (high school dropout). Many of these covariates may serve as proxies for unobserved characteristics with which they are correlated. The full list of matching covariates can be found in Appendix A . Second, we compare the distribution of pre- high school characteristics before and after matching using t-tests and measures of standardized bias to ensure that the groups are balanced on observed characteristics. However, it is important to note that propensity score matching by itself does not solve problems of selection bias. Any covariate that is unmeasured but highly correlated with switching schools could bias the estimated treatment effects.

After computing propensity scores, we matched treated youth (those who switched schools) to counterfactuals who were similar on observed characteristics but who did not switch schools. While there are many strategies for selecting counterfactuals, we accomplished matching using two common methods: nearest neighbor caliper matching with replacement and kernel matching. In nearest neighbor matching, treatment cases are randomly sorted and each treated individual t is matched with the control case c with the closest propensity score ( Smith & Todd, 2005 ) as follows:

where p t and p c are the propensity scores for the treated and control cases, respectively. The matching algorithm attempts to minimize the absolute difference between the treatment and control propensity scores. However, one shortcoming of nearest neighbor matching is that matches may not have the same propensity as treated cases. This is because nearest neighbor matching does not usually address the issue of common support, thereby leading to potentially bad matches when treated and control groups are substantially different. To address this issue, we imposed a restriction on the maximum distance between treated cases and counterfactuals. Specifically, we used a caliper of .01, meaning that the probability of treatment for each counterfactual had to be within 1 percent (high or low) of the probability for the treated case to which it was matched. Caliper matching ensures that treated and control cases are very similar 2 . To ensure that a match was found for every treated case, we matched with replacement, meaning that once an untreated control had been chosen for a match, they were able to serve as a counterfactual for multiple treated cases. While this strategy increases the variance of the treatment effect estimates, it maximizes the number of treated cases that are matched to counterfactuals.

We employ a second matching method—kernel matching—to assess the robustness of our findings. Whereas nearest neighbor matching pairs each treated case to only one counterfactual, kernel matching pairs treated cases with multiple counterfactuals weighted based on the distance of their propensity score. The distance is measured by the difference in propensity scores between the treated and control cases. In kernel matching, the contribution of each control case to the treatment effect of switching schools is dependent on its distance in propensity score. Youth who are similar in their estimated propensity count more in the estimation of the treatment effect than youth who are different. In other words, better matches contribute more to the parameter estimates. In this way, kernel matching improves upon the estimates provided by nearest neighbor matching. We impose a bandwidth of .01 to produce results that are comparable with those derived from nearest neighbor matching.

After matching, we estimated treatment effects by calculating the percentage of youth who dropped out in both the unmatched and matched samples. To examine whether the effects of school transfer on dropout vary by preexisting differences, we stratified our sample by quartile of propensity score. We then estimate treatment effects separately for youth with different propensities for switching high schools.

Data and Methods

This study uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97), sponsored by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The NLSY97 is a nationally representative longitudinal survey of youth who were 12 to 16 years old on the sampling date of December 31, 1996 (or who were born between 1980 and 1984) 3 . The NLSY97 is designed to document the transition from school to work and into adulthood. The NLSY97 sample is composed of two independent probability samples: (1) a cross-sectional sample of 6,748 youths who are representative of the noninstitutionalized population of youths in the U.S. who were born between 1980 and 1984, and (2) an oversample of 2,236 black and Hispanic youths. The cohort was selected this way to meet the survey design requirement of providing enough black and Hispanic respondents for statistical analyses.

School Mobility

Our measure of school mobility is derived from retrospective self-reports of each school attended since the last interview. Beginning in round 2, the youth questionnaire collects information on each school that a youth attended since the last interview. Youth are queried on the dates of attendance as well as the grade level of the school (e.g., elementary school, middle school, high school). Information for each school is entered on a roster, and a unique ID number assigned to each school for each youth enables the identification of schools attended by a youth in previous rounds. This makes it possible to construct the complete history of each school attended for each youth, including the dates attended and the grade level. Using this information, we created a variable that counted the number of high schools that a youth ever reported attending. We then created a dummy variable equal to 1 if a youth ever attended more than one high school and 0 if a youth attended only one high school. 4 Mobile youth are therefore considered youth who attended more than one high school. 5 Since changing high schools should not be the result of a promotion from one grade to the next, our measure of school mobility should tap non-promotional school change. 6

The dependent variable in this study is dropout, which we derived from youth self-reports of school enrollment at each round of the NLSY97. NLSY97 staff created a variable that summarizes the youth's enrollment status at each round based on the information collected on school enrollment. Dropout is defined as any youth who is not enrolled in school and who does not have a high school diploma at the time of the round 7 interview, when the youth are between the ages of 19 and 22. Youth who obtained a GED are counted as high school dropouts in the analysis because their labor market outcomes are more similar to those of high school dropouts than to those of high school graduates ( Cameron & Heckman, 1993 ). 7

Matching Covariates

Our selection of covariates used to predict the propensity for switching high schools was partially guided by the few studies that exist that examine the causes of switching schools, and the requirement that the covariates be measured before the event of interest. This literature suggests that youth who switch schools are more disadvantaged academically and socioeconomically. As noted by Rubin and Thomas (1996) , the criteria for including variables in the propensity score model is not their statistical significance but rather their power in balancing the means and covariances of the treatment and control groups. For this reason, and because the literature on the causes of switching schools is quite thin, we were liberal in our variable selection and excluded a variable only if there was reason to believe that it was unrelated to treatment or outcome. If balance can be achieved on a large number of characteristics, it strengthens our confidence that the differences between treatment and matched counterfactuals are minimized.

The NLSY97 is particularly well suited to propensity score matching because it contains rich information on both time-invariant and time-varying characteristics from before youth entered high school. We matched youth on 177 covariates including: demographics, family processes, socioeconomic status, health, delinquency, victimization, peer influence, school experiences, adult-like behaviors, and time use (see Appendix A ). Prior studies show that demographic factors are associated with school mobility. Black and Hispanic youth are more likely to move than white youth ( Ream, 2003 ; Rumberger & Larson, 1998 ). Changes in family structure may also lead to mobility ( Astone & McLanahan, 1994 ). One important demographic factor in predicting school mobility is residential mobility. Therefore, we include demographic measures such as gender, race, family structure, residential location, region, and average number of residential moves per year since birth. We also consider family processes and dynamics. The dynamics of single- and stepparent families that are prone to moving may put youth at risk for school disengagement and dropout. For example, a single-parent family may provide youth with less supervision and monitoring and fewer resources for academic success and the addition of new family members may destabilize family interactions in stepfamilies. Family processes are linked with school withdrawal, including dropout ( Rumberger, Ghatak, Poulos, Ritter, & Dornbusch, 1995 )

While prior research is ambivalent about the relationship between socioeconomic status and switching schools, socioeconomic factors are extremely predictive of dropout ( Ekstrom, Goertz, Pollack, & Rock, 1986 ; Rumberger, 1983 ) We include a wide array of socioeconomic indicators, including mother's age at first birth, parental education, receipt of various types of public assistance, and information on family assets.

We also match youth on measures of delinquency and problem behavior. Youth who are deemed “troublesome” may be transferred to another school or alternative program, and delinquency problem behavior plays a key role in the process of withdrawal from school, including dropout ( Elliott & Voss, 1974 ; Mensch & Kandel, 1988 ). Our measures of problem behaviors include youth's participation in delinquency and substance use, and whether a youth has ever had sexual intercourse or been arrested. We include a related set of indicators for peer influence, which has also been linked to dropping out.

We include covariates to capture youth's victimization experiences. Moving or switching schools may be prompted by being bullied or living in an unsafe neighborhood. Our measures of victimization include whether a youth had been bullied by age 12, whether the youth's house had been broken into, and whether the youth had ever seen someone get shot.

Consistent with the idea that switching schools is one point along a continuum of disengagement, prior research shows that academic achievement and engagement are important predictors of switching schools ( Lee & Burkam, 1992 ; Rumberger & Larson, 1998 ). Switching schools may be an alternative to dropping out for youth who feel alienated and are seeking a change of environment. Our measure of school performance and engagement include 8 th grade GPA, grade retention, suspension, and standardized scores on the CAT-ASVAB. We also include a related set of indicators capturing how youth spend their time, including doing homework, watching TV, reading, etc. These behaviors may serve as proxies for engagement in school.

All of our observed covariates used to match treatment and control cases were measured in round 1 (1997), before youth in our analytic sample entered high school. Thus, they occur before the treatment of switching high schools, which is a requirement for propensity score matching. 8

Sample Size and Missing Data

Not all of the 8,984 NLSY97 youth are included in this analysis. We have selected a sample that allows us to assess the effect of switching high schools on dropout for youth who are similar on pre-high school characteristics. This involved making several restrictions to the sample. First, we limited our analyses to youth who were born in 1983 and 1984, since youth who were born between 1980 and 1982 had already started high school by round 1 of the NLSY97. If we had included youth who were already enrolled in high school by round 1, we could not use round 1 covariates to match because they would have occurred after treatment for many youth. Moreover, we do not have information on non-promotional school changes before round 1. This restriction resulted in the largest sample loss. However, because this sample selection was based largely on age, it should not bias our results. Second, since we required information on whether a youth changed high schools or dropped out, we limited our sample to youth who were interviewed at some point after they should have graduated from high school, even if they missed a wave, since they would have complete retrospective school enrollment histories. We chose to limit our analyses to youth who participated in the round 8 interview, when our sample members were between the ages of 19 and 21 and should have graduated from high school. Third, we excluded any youth for whom we could not determine whether they changed high schools or dropped out. The final sample consists of 2,751 respondents. 9

With the exception of the measures of household income and cognitive ability, the response rate for most items in the NLSY97 is quite high. However, given the large number of observed covariates used to match changers and non-changers, discarding cases with missing data on any covariate would result in substantial data loss. At the same time, missing data on a covariate may tell us something important about an individual that may be related to their propensity for treatment. We followed a method recommended by Rosenbaum and Rubin (1984) and imputed missing covariate data and included a dummy variable flag for the missing values. In this way, the propensity score reflects the pattern of missingness and groups should be balanced on the distribution of missing values as well as observed covariates. Since missing values are flagged, the choice of imputed value does not affect the parameter estimate for the covariate with missing data. In this case, we chose to impute missing values with zero. However, the choice of imputed value could affect the differences between treatment and control groups, so we assess balance only on valid observations for covariates.

Descriptive Findings

Figure 1 shows the number of high schools attended by NLSY97 youth born in 1983 and 1984. Since the estimates are weighted, they may be thought of as nationally representative. Over 70 percent (71.9) percent of NLSY97 youth attended one high school. About one in five youth (19.8 percent) attended two high schools, and 6.6 percent of youth attended three high schools. Few youth attended more than three high schools.

Table 1 shows the percentage of youth who were high school dropouts in round 8 by the number of high schools attended. Consistent with prior research, youth who attend more than one high school are more likely to be high school dropouts. The dropout rate for youth who stay in the same high school is 8.1 percent. The dropout rate for youth who attend two high schools (one change) is over twice that rate—19.1 percent. The dropout rate for youth who attend three to five high schools is three times the dropout rate for youth who stay in the same school—between 25.9 and 29.5 percent. The overall high school dropout rate in the NLSY97 sample is 11.9 percent.

Comparing Switchers and Stayers

One of the biggest problems with the comparisons in Table 1 is that youth who attend more than one high school are likely to be different on a wide array of characteristics before high school. A major benefit of the NLSY97 is a rich set of pre-high school characteristics which can be used to compare mobile and non-mobile youth. Youth who changed high schools differ from youth who did not change high schools on 110 of these pre-high school characteristics according to a two tailed t test at p<.05—that is, they differ on nearly two-thirds of the characteristics (62 percent).

A useful way of assessing the extent of covariate imbalance is the standardized bias, as recommended by Rosenbaum and Rubin (1985) . This can be calculated as follows:

In this equation x t is the sample mean for the treatment group and x c is the sample mean for the control group; s t and s c are the respective sample standard deviations, which are equally weighted. When the absolute value of this statistic is greater than 20, the covariate is said to be imbalanced.

Standardized biases are presented in Appendix A for all covariates used in matching. Using this criterion, 39 covariates, or 25 percent of the covariates, are unbalanced between the two groups. Clearly, a change of high schools is not the only difference between youth who switch high schools and those who stay in the same high school. The results shed some light on how switchers differ from stayers. Demographic and socioeconomic indicators are the most imbalanced. Youth who switch schools are more likely to live in a central city, to come from a household where the biological mother is the only parent and to have a mother who gave birth when she was a teenager. Youth who switch schools are also more socioeconomically disadvantaged. They are less likely to have a computer at home, more likely to have parents who received various types of government aid, and have fewer family assets. Not surprisingly, switchers also have a history of residential moves.

However, socioeconomics are not the only differences between switchers and stayers. They also differ in terms of family processes and dynamics. Switchers are less attached to their father figures, subject to less monitoring by their mother and father figures, and their parents are less likely to volunteer at school. Consistent with prior studies on the causes of switching schools, switchers also have lower academic achievement and higher disengagement than stayers. For example, youth who switch high schools are more frequently absent from school, have lower 8 th grade GPAs, and are more likely to have been suspended from school than stayers. There are also large differences in terms of school aptitude. Youth who switch high schools perform more poorly on most subsets of the ASVAB.

To address this comparability problem, we matched school movers to non-movers based on propensity scores derived from the 177 pre-high school characteristics. Of the 818 youth who switched high schools, we matched 797 to counterfactuals who did not switch high schools. We discarded 21 switchers for whom we could not find a suitable counterfactual from among the stayers. Even though we allowed a counterfactual to serve as a control for more than one youth (replacement), a full 87 percent of the controls were matched to just one treated case.

Figure 2 shows the distribution of propensity scores by school mobility. The figure shows the percent of switcher and stayers that have estimated propensity scores that fall within each of the propensity score groups. The average propensity score is .30, showing that switching highs schools is not an uncommon experience for youth in the NLSY97. The highest propensity score was .98; the lowest propensity score was .00. For youth who switched high schools, the average propensity score was .42; for youth who stayed in the same high school, the average propensity score was .24. Figure 2 shows that youth who changed schools have higher propensity scores on average than youth who did not change schools. Many youth who do not change schools are not useful counterfactuals for youth who do change schools, and a few youth who did not change schools serve as useful comparisons. However, there is still a great deal of common support.

Table 2 provides a summary of covariate balance before and after matching. By matching via nearest neighbor with replacement and a caliper of .01, all but five of the 177 matching covariates are brought into balance between switchers and stayers using the t test criteria 10 . For example, switchers spend fewer days reading and are more frequently absent from school after matching by nearest neighbor. Given the theoretical importance of school disengagement, imbalance on the number of absences raises concern. However, 97 percent of the covariates are balanced using the t test criteria. Moreover, using the Rosenbaum and Rubin standardized bias criteria, evidence for balance is even stronger: none of the original 39 covariates classified as imbalanced remains so after matching. Even in a randomized experiment, we would expect some significant differences between changers and non-changers simply due to switching schools when looking at 177 covariates. Less than 1 percent is well under the 5 percent we might expect by chance alone. However, kernel matching successfully achieves balance on all 177 covariates. The five covariates that were imbalanced after nearest neighbor matching are balanced after kernel matching. For this reason we regard the treatment effect estimates derived from kernel matching to be more accurate than those derived from nearest neighbor matching.

Nearest neighbor matching was performed with a caliper of .01 and replacement. Kernel matching was performed using the Epanechnikov kernel.

A useful metric of balance is reduction in absolute standardized bias, which is calculated by first determining unadjusted bias, then calculating adjusted bias and the percent decrease in the absolute value of each. Standardized bias reductions from nearest neighbor and kernel matching are presented in Table 3 for the 25 covariates that were most biased in unadjusted comparisons. Most of these covariates had standardized biases greater than 25 percent before matching, and many had biases higher than 30 or even 40. As can be seen, most of these covariates were indicators of socioeconomic status and academic achievement, engagement, and aptitude. For many of the covariates, matching reduced bias by over 90 percent, and for most, bias was reduced by 80 percent. Kernel matching is more successful than nearest neighbor matching in reducing bias on socioeconomic and academic characteristics. The one exception is number of absences, for which bias was reduced by only 39 percent after nearest neighbor matching and 57 percent after kernel matching. However, the fact that kernel matching is able to balance absences between switchers and stayers by both the standardized bias and t-test criteria minimizes any concern that we may have about possible confounding on absences. 11 It appears that by matching, we were successfully able to eliminate differences between mobile and non-mobile youth on 177 covariates.

Note: The unadjusted mean is the mean of the covariate for switchers and stayers before propensity score matching. The standardized bias is a standardized version of the difference in the covariate means between the two groups before matching. Standardized biases that have absolute values greater than 20 are said to be imbalanced. Positive values indicate that switchers have more of a characteristic than stayers; negative values indicate that switchers have less of a characteristic. The percent reduction in bias is the percent by which standardized bias of the covariate was reduce by matching. Larger values indicate that matching was more successful in balancing the covariate between the groups.

Treatment Effect Estimates of Switching High Schools

Table 4 gives the estimated treatment effects of switching high schools on dropping out. The first row provides treatment effects estimates before performing propensity score matching. These provide baseline estimates of the treatment effect of switching high schools on dropping out. The effect of switching high schools on dropping out is large in the unmatched sample. Switchers have a dropout rate that is 14.6 percentage points higher than stayers. However, the effect of switching high schools on dropping out is noticeably smaller after matching switchers and stayers on propensity scores. For example, after matching using nearest neighbor, school switchers have a dropout rate 8.5 percentage points higher than stayers. In kernel matching, the dropout rate is only 5.7 percentage points higher. The treatment effect of mobility on dropout using kernel matching is less than half the baseline treatment effect. Switching high schools has a significant effect on dropout once we account for selection into switching high schools. 12

Note: Standard errors for nearest neighbor and kernel matching estimates were calculated using 1,000 bootstrap iterations to account for the fact that the propensity score was estimated in an earlier step.

Heterogeneous Effects of School Mobility on High School Dropout

We examined whether the influence of switching high schools on dropout varied by a youth's propensity to switch high schools by stratifying our matched sample into quartiles of propensity score. Each youth receives a propensity score between 0 and 1 that indicates his or her propensity to switch high schools. Within our matched sample, we divide youth into four equal groups based on their propensity to switch high schools, ranging from low to high. The bottom fourth included youth whose propensity scores ranged from .02 and .24, youth in the second quartile had propensity scores between .24 to .36, youth in the third quartile had propensity scores between .36 and .52, and youth in the top third had propensity scores between .52 to .86.

Youth in the four propensity groups differ along demographic, socioeconomic, behavioral and academic dimensions. For example, nearly two thirds (64 percent) of youth in the low propensity group live with both biological parents, compared to 44 and 35 percent in the middle groups and 27% in the highest propensity group. Similarly, 20 percent of youth in the low propensity group had a teen mother, as compared to 46% in the highest propensity quartile. Interviewers for the NLSY97 report that 73% of the houses that the low propensity group live in are ‘nice’, as compared to only 41% of the homes where the high propensity group reside. The neighborhoods of high propensity youth are also more dangerous (twice as many interviewers report concerns for their safety in the communities where the high risk youth live), are more likely to have gangs, and these youth report twice as many break-ins to their home as their lower propensity counterparts.

Youth with a high propensity for school changes differ on more than just family characteristics. They report engaging in theft crimes at rates that are more than 10 times higher than youth who are at a lower risk for school mobility. They are four times more likely to report being bullied at school, three times more likely to report being in a fight and are suspended at four times the rate of their lower risk counterparts. The high propensity youth report fewer pro-school peers, more absences, less school attachment and lower test scores. Clearly, youth in the higher propensity groups have a greater constellation of risk factors for dropping out than youth in the lowest propensity group.

We examined whether switching high schools has a different effect on dropout for these propensity groups by comparing dropout rates within each group. Figure 3 presents dropout rates in the matched sample by propensity score level and whether a youth switched high schools. The figure shows that, for school changers, dropout rates increase with each propensity score level. Within each propensity score level, youth who switched high schools are at a higher risk of dropping out than youth who stayed in the same high school. We performed t-tests to determine whether the dropout rates were different within each stratum. These results suggest that dropout rates were significantly higher among switchers in the two middle strata only. This suggests that the effect of changing high schools works differently for youth with varying school mobility risk levels. For those students who were most and least at risk for a school change, the school change did not have an independent effect on whether they dropped out. Rather, school mobility made the difference between dropping out and not dropping out only among students who were at moderate risk of changing schools to begin with. 13

* The difference in proportion between switchers and stayers is statistically significant at p < .05.

Why might this be? Appendix B shows how youth with varying propensities for switching schools compare on a number of important family, school, neighborhood and behavior measures. It is clear that the middle two strata are at a much higher risk for school mobility and other negative educational outcomes, as compared to the youth in the lowest propensity strata. Therefore, they are less likely to be buffered by past academic success, a stable family and economic resources. However, when compared to the highest propensity strata, the two middle strata are less mobile (experiencing 2.3. to 2.5 moves, compared to 3.4 moves), less likely to have been raised by a teen mom, more likely to be monitored by both parents, and considerably less likely to have been on welfare in the last 5 years. They are also much less likely to report having committed a major theft, having attacked another student, being bullied themselves, or having smoked pot. Their suspension rates are also much lower. It seems as though while the middle strata students are already struggling in some ways (when compared to the lowest risk students), as long as they stay in the same school with the same teachers and peers, they might be able to persist to graduation. However, if a disruptive school transfer occurs, it might trigger their pre-existing risk factors and problem behaviors and lead to a process of more delinquency and academic withdrawal.

As for the strata least at risk for a school transfer, previous research suggests that perhaps more stable families, higher academic engagement and a low tendency toward delinquency buffer these youth when they do change schools. In other words, they have a safety net and a solid set of personal resources that could help them weather the storm of a school switch. For the strata most at risk for school mobility, it could be that they are already far along the path to withdrawal and academic disengagement and the school change would not change their dropout chances either way. These students are already operating with such a substantial set of challenges and instabilities that the additional transition does not alter their behaviors. We cannot definitively conclude why the middle risk students seem most affected by school mobility, or why the most at risk youth don't experience a further increase in their dropout rates after the change. However, it is important to recognize that the effects of school transitions (and likely family transitions) do not affect all youth the same way, possibly indicating a need for different kinds of assistance to students from different backgrounds.

Discussion and Conclusion

Although the focus has shifted to the importance of a college degree for increasing the chances of attaining success in America, the value of a high school diploma has never been greater. Over the past 25 years, earnings differences between high school graduates and high school dropouts have grown ( Day & Newburger, 2002 ). Youth who miss out on this important developmental milestone are likely not only to find themselves without the skills to succeed in a competitive U.S. labor market that increasingly rewards skills and education but are also likely to be beset by other problems—including imprisonment, poor heath, and having children who are also at risk of high school dropout, to name a few. In this study, we have shown that dropping out of high school is not an uncommon experience for youth in the NLSY97, a nationally representative sample of U.S. youth; about 12 percent of youth have not obtained a high school diploma by their early 20s, and this number is nearly 20 percent if GEDs are counted as high school dropouts.

Like previous research, we find that just under 30% of high school students attend more than one high school, and the students who change schools are more likely to drop out. Consistent with other studies that examine the backgrounds of mobile students, we find that the students who are most likely to switch schools are also those students who are operating with a number of existing risk factors, such as behavioral problems, lower test scores, more school absences, a non-intact family, previous substance use, lower incomes and more residential mobility. However, unlike previous research, we use a more appropriate modeling strategy to help better disentangle the consequences of switching schools from the effects of preexisting differences in risk factors for dropout between mobile and non-mobile youth. Using propensity score matching, we compared outcomes for students who were similar in their observed risk for school mobility, but who differed by whether or not they actually switched schools.

We found that the differences in dropout rates between switchers and stayers could be largely accounted for by family structure and previous behavior and academic performance. However, even after accounting for factors that affect ‘selection’ into mobility (the treatment), changing schools during high school increased dropout by between 6 and 9%. Therefore, it seems possible that switching high schools is part of the process of disengaging from school and it can contribute to dropout.

Another contribution of our work is the finding that school mobility does not work the same way for all youth. For those students who are operating with myriad risk factors, changing schools does not further increase their already high chances of dropout. At the other end of the spectrum, for the students least at risk of changing schools, a school switch does not seem to increase the chances of dropping out. These students are likely well protected from any of the destabilizing effects of mobility, coming from two parent families and reporting low levels of problem behavior and higher levels of school attachment and test scores. The more troubling groups are the two middle propensity strata—those students who are not the least at risk or the worst off. These students seem to dropout at higher rates if they change schools, suggesting that the difficulty of the school transfer might interact with some background risk factors and push them into a spiral of disengagement. These students are better off than their highest risk counterparts, having lower delinquency rates, coming from slightly less mobile families, having lower rates of being born to a teenage mom, and living in less crime ridden neighborhoods. However, they are similar in that they are still lower income and prone to some school behavior problems.

Limitations and Directions for Future Research

While we have made improvements over previous work in this area, the findings of this study should be interpreted with several limitations in mind. First, while the use of propensity score matching represents a substantial improvement over prior studies on the effects of switching schools on dropout, it is by no means a panacea. Propensity score matching only addresses selection on covariates that were measured and used to predict the propensity scores. To the extent that any characteristic that causes both switching schools and dropping out was omitted, our treatment effect estimates will be biased. We believe that by assessing balance on almost 200 observed characteristics, we have reduced the threat of selection bias considerably more than prior studies. However, it is never possible to approximate randomization with observational data, and future researchers should continue to investigate whether the relationship between switching schools is robust when matching on additional covariates, such as measures of school characteristics, which may influence student departure but were not included in this study.

A second limitation is that this study was unable to assess the impact of switching schools before high school on dropping out. Even before they entered 9 th grade, many youth who eventually switched high schools were already disengaged from school, not doing well academically, and frequently suspended from school. The academic and behavioral problems experienced by these youth may well be effects of switching schools multiple times in elementary and middle school. By the time they get to high school, many youth who switch schools may have already experienced a developmental process of school failure, disengagement from school, and switching schools that will ultimately culminate in dropping out. For such youth, switching high schools may well represent the continuation of a pattern that began years before. Switching elementary or middle schools may be more detrimental to graduation prospects. Future research should therefore consider the consequences of early school changes and how such disruptions explain the relationship between later transitions and dropping out.

There are also substantive limitations that follow from some of these methodological shortcomings. While we can examine students' propensity to switch schools based on observable covariates, we still do not know the unobservable reasons behind why the school change occurred. For example, we do not know whether the school change was initiated by the school (in the case of serious behavior problems) or the parents and student themselves (in the case of highly motivated families). We are also unable to examine whether the school change was a long or short distance from the student's original school and whether the quality of the new school varied significantly from the previous school. It is clear that in order to better understand the process behind school mobility, we need more qualitative and ethnographic studies that more closely follow the trajectories of stable and mobile students and their families. One example is Ream (2005b) , which uses mixed methods research to show that the reasons why students move are complex, involving both strategic and reactive responses on the part of families and schools. More research along these lines could shed light on the costs and benefits to mobility and how the conditions under which youth change schools have implications for their educational, social and developmental outcomes. More research along these lines could shed light on the costs and benefits to mobility and how the conditions under which youth change schools have implications for their educational, social, and developmental outcomes.

Such research is necessary to better understand what kinds of programs and practices could help support students when they do change schools, and what parents need to know before initiating a school change. The results from this study indicate that school mobility may be a significant factor that leads some students to dropout of high school. While our study cannot pinpoint the most effective practices to prevent dropout for such students (see Rumberger et al, 1999 for discussion of recommendations), it does further support the concerns of researchers and policymakers that school mobility increases the risk of educational failure and is therefore an important area for future research (e.g. National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, 2010).

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the National Academy of Education, the Spencer Foundation and the William T. Grant Foundation for supporting the analysis and writing of this manuscript through generous fellowships to the second author. The authors gratefully acknowledge Steve McClaskie of the Center for Human Resources Research at Ohio State University, whose expertise was invaluable in helping us navigate the NLSY97 data set.

Appendix A: Variables Use in Propensity Score Equation

A positive value for a t-statistic or standardized bias indicates that school changers have more of that characteristic; a negative value indicates that they have less

Appendix B. Descriptive statistics for select covariates, by propensity for switching high schools

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the American Educational Research Association annual meeting in Denver, CO.

He has published on the topics of high school dropout, student engagement, and juvenile delinquency. He is particularly interested in research methods and is currently involved in a number of studies at Westat in the areas of education, employment and training, and aging.

All three authors are broadly interested in the way social context (e.g., family, school, and neighborhood) shapes the educational outcomes of young people as well as causal inference with experimental and non-experimental data. The research was motivated by the first author's interest in understanding high school dropout as a developmental process, and the second author's focus on the role of housing and neighborhoods on family and youth outcomes. In an earlier paper in Social Science Research, the authors found that the effects of residential and school mobility on adolescent delinquency and drug use were explained by unobserved differences between mobile and non-mobile youth, a finding at odds with the consensus that mobility is harmful. The authors hope that this research will spur a renewed interest in understanding the underlying motivations why youth change schools and their implications for adolescent development.

1 Christopher Swanson and Duncan Chaplin used data from the Common Core of Data (CCD) to calculate the Cumulative Promotion Index (CPI). The value of the CPI approximates the probability that a student entering 9 th grade will complete high school four years later with a regular diploma. They find a national graduation rate of 66.6 percent. They also observed dramatic racial disparities in high school completion, with white and Asian students graduating at much higher rates than students from historically disadvantaged minority groups. White and Asian students complete high school at 75 and 77 percent, respectively. By contrast, graduation rates for black and Hispanic students are 50 and 53 percent, respectively.

2 We used the commonly employed Epanechnikov kernel, which is the default for kernel matching in STATA's psmatch2. However, we also implemented kernel matching with other kernels, including the normal kernel. Choice of kernel did not affect our results. Results are available from the authors upon request.

3 The NLSY97 cohort was selected in two phases. In the first phase, a list of housing units was derived from a stratified multistage area probability sample. The list of eligible housing units was composed of 96,512 households. In the second phase, subsamples of eligible persons identified in the first phase were selected. Screener interviews were completed in 75,291 households to identify individuals in the appropriate age range for the study. Of the 9,806 respondents who were identified as eligible for the survey, 8,984 participated in round 1 of the survey, which took place in 1997 (91.6 percent of eligible respondents). Follow-up interviews with the original respondents are conducted annually. NLS surveys are known for their relatively high sample retention rates. In the case of the NLSY97, 81.7 percent or 7,338 of the original round 1 respondents also participated in round 9 (2005).

4 There are two additional sources of school information in the NLSY97. In 1997, the parent interview collected information on the number of schools a youth attended since 7 th grade, including grade level. While the parent interview could provide retrospective information about the number of high schools attended for youth who attended high school before round 1, such youth are not included in the study because baseline covariates measured in round 1 would have occurred after changing high schools. A second source of information is the transcript survey. In round 2 and again in round 8, NLS staff collected high school transcripts from NLSY97 respondents who had graduated from high school or who were no longer enrolled but who were age 18 or older. Each high school transcript contains a school ID code identifying the high school from which coursework was completed. Using this information, we constructed a second measure of school mobility counting the number of high schools attended as indicated on a youth's transcript. However, we found that this measure lacked validity. It did not correspond to the self-report measure and youth who changed schools did not fit the profile of school changers. We suspect the reason has to do with variations in the way schools report transferred coursework taken over the summer.

5 We believe we are justified in using two or more high schools as the cut point for our measure of school mobility. Most youth in the NLSY97 who attend more than one high school attend only two high schools.

6 We were unable to also consider the effect of residential mobility. The NLSY97 collects the dates of all moves to a different city, county, or state but not of moves within the same city. Because the date of short-distance moves in unknown, we would have had to exclude them from the analysis and focus only on long-distance moves. Because poor and minority youth are more likely to make short-distance moves, the results would be biased toward the effect of long-distance residential moves among middle-class youth. For this reason, we chose not to examine the effect of residential mobility. We do not believe, however, that excluding residential mobility overstates the effect of school mobility. Residential mobility is thought to lead to dropout in part because it prompts a change of schools. Indeed, most of the mechanisms by which residential mobility would affect dropout (such as loss of friends or adult relationships) are also implicated in school mobility.

7 We also conducted all of the analyses with GED holders counted as high school graduates and the overall results were unchanged.

8 Because the covariates used to predict a youth's propensity to switch high schools were all measured at round 1, and because youth were in different grades at round 1, the length of time between the measurement of the covariates and entering 9 th grade (or switching high schools) varies from youth to youth. For youth who entered high school shortly after round 1, the measures represent more distal information on disengagement and performance.

9 We conducted analyses to examine whether our analytic samples differed from the full NLSY97 sample, given that the most mobile youth might have dropped out between Wave 1 and any later waves. When comparing the two samples on twenty-one of the covariates used in the models, we found that there were almost no significant differences on mean values of the covariates. The samples had equivalent means on family income, parental education and the proportion of youth in two parent families, which reduces the concerns about attrition bias.

10 One of these five, the chronic health conditions scale, was balanced before matching. Two of the covariates—whether there are any gangs in the youth's neighborhood and whether a youth had ever been arrested—were imbalanced in the opposite direction before matching. That is, before matching, switchers were more likely to report gangs in their neighborhoods and having been arrested, but after matching by nearest neighbor they are less likely to report these events.

11 Given the theoretical importance of absences for dropout, we attempt to improve the percent bias reduction in number of absences by including a squared term for absences in the propensity score model, a strategy recommended by some researchers ( Rubin & Thomas, 1996 ). The addition of this higher order term resulted in a 99 percent balance reduction on number of absences. However, further reducing the bias on number of absences did not change the estimated effect of switching schools on dropout. Results are available from the author upon request.

12 As mentioned, propensity score matching addresses selection bias owing to observed but not unobserved characteristics. We believe that we have minimized concerns about unobserved heterogeneity by matching switchers and stayers on 177 covariates measured prior to high school. However, in order to assess the effect that such “hidden bias” might have on our results, we conducted a sensitivity analysis. Specifically, we calculated Rosenbaum's bounds, which show how strong the correlation between an unobserved covariate and switching schools would have to be in order for the effect of switching schools on dropout to be rendered spurious (see Rosenbaum and Rubin 1983 for a more technical discussion). Results indicated that an unobserved covariate would have to affect the odds of switching schools by a factor of 1.5 (or 50 percent) in order for the effect of switching schools to drop from significance at the .05 level. An unobserved covariate that affects the odds of treatment by 1.1 to 1.4 does not change the findings. The findings therefore appear to be sensitive to a moderate amount of bias, increasing our confidence in the results. Results are available from the authors upon request.

13 We conducted this analysis further subdividing the sample into five rather than four propensity score strata. We found a similar pattern of results to those obtained with four strata. For youth in the lowest and highest strata, switching schools had no effect on dropout. However, for youth in the middle three strata, switching schools had a significant effect of dropout. Results of this analysis are available from the authors upon request.

Contributor Information

Joseph Gasper, Westat, 1600 Research Blvd. Rockville, MD 20850, (240) 314-2485, (301) 610-4905.

Stefanie DeLuca, JHU Department of Sociology, 532 Mergenthaler Hall, 3400. N. Charles St. Baltimore, MD 21218, (410) 516-7629, (410) 516-7590.

Angela Estacion, JHU Department of Sociology, 533 Mergenthaler Hall, 3400. N. Charles St. Baltimore, MD 21218, (410) 516-7626, (410) 516-7590.

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College Essay: Adapting to Change

I am wrapped warmly in my thin, soft, rainbow blanket looking up at my mother and father in a blurry haze. For the next 15 years, that rainbow blanket would be an object of comfort, home and family. When I was young, I never wanted to grow up and become an adult because reality was endless and full of possibilities. I was too afraid to leave the warmth of my home and step into the real world with aspirations of my own. But, the year 2019-20 has shifted my entire view, and I had to adapt to the changes that occurred when growing up.  

The elders always ask me, “Thaum koj loj los koj yuav dhau los ua kws kho mob, puas yog?” This translates to, “When you are older you’re going to become a doctor, right?” 

“Yes,” I quickly reply without thinking, because it is such a common question. For 15 years, I’ve set strict rules to achieve my goals. I had my whole life planned out–until I went to high school.  

Transitioning to high school was a steep, icy hill. There were many obstacles I had to face that reflected my determination. For nine years, I had spent my entire life with the same adults, peers and school, but it was time to step out of my comfort zone.   

“YOU GOT INTO THE MATH AND SCIENCE ACADEMY!!” my mom screamed joyfully, as if she was the one  who had been accepted. However, I was nervous about attending the No. 1 public charter school in Minnesota.  

Regardless, I wanted to play for the volleyball team. I had practiced for weeks to improve my serve. It was toward the end of August and humid outside. My knees were shaking, and my stomach was quivering with fear. My head was dizzy and my throat was dry. As I walked into the building, I felt a rush of cool air overwhelm me. It smelled like new wood; everything was polished. I peeked into the gym and saw girls that were more than 5 feet tall. After half of the tryout, I made new friends. I was excited to play volleyball with them, and I soon got over the feeling of being an outsider. Since the student body population was small, I connected with teachers and students. I even joined clubs. I finally belonged.  

Then March 13, 2020, hit and altered my sense of belonging at school. I was finally happy and comfortable with the high standards of Math and Science Academy, but COVID-19 drastically impacted everyone; it was time to adapt.

I learn online curriculum, practice social distancing and participate in extracurricular activities online. As the oldest of six, I am responsible for myself and the care of the family.  I tend to my 1-year-old sister, Scarlett, and help watch my siblings. I give my rainbow blanket to Scarlett when she’s fussy. Now, my rainbow blanket is part of my family’s memories. I learn to appreciate and grow as a learner and daughter. I understand my parents, grandparents and siblings better than ever before. I know that my passion for helping people and seeing families united and joyful is my vocation. I want to become  a cardiothoracic surgeon to help families through hard times and give them the hope to continue on. We can only adapt to change.  

“Even if the desert becomes cracked, no matter who shakes this world, don’t let go of the hand you’re holding.” This quote is from someone who reminds me to continue making new memories while holding the past, much like my rainbow blanket. This blanket reminds me that when I pursue higher education and start a family, I will always have the strength of my memories that tie me back to who I am.

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ThreeSixty Journalism,

a nonprofit program of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of St. Thomas, uses the principles of strong writing and reporting to help diverse Minnesota youth tell the stories of their lives and communities.

Essay About Transferring Schools

When I found out I was changing schools I felt like my whole world was going to end. I did not want to leave my old school and my friends. My dad received a job opportunity and was transferred to another state so my family and I did not have a choice but to go. So much anxiety built up inside as I realized that I had to make new friends at a new school. Also, being aware that I had to retake a class because some of my credits did not transfer.

When I did began my first week of school my whole life changed for the better. On the first day of school I cruised into class thinking to myself, “I can most likely make this new school thing work.” The first desk I saw was open so I sat in it. The teacher called me to the front of the class.

I was really nervous as the palm of my hands became sweaty as I walked to the front of the class. She politely stated, “Class we have new student. Her name is Sarahlyn Argrow.” I went back to my desk with a smile on my face. When the bell rang I went to my next class which was economics. Economics was one of the classes I had to retake because it didn’t transfer over from my other high school. I met my best friend till this day Leya Ferguson in my economic class.

Essay Example on School Changes

As I am sitting in the front of the class a girl came and sat in the desk right next to me.

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“Hey what is your name? Are you new here?” she questioned. “Hi my name is Sarahlyn Argrow and yes I am new here.” I delightedly replied. We continued the conversation. We both were able to get to know each other very well. We started going to the movies, mall, and just hanging out. We got along well. We even tried out for the cheerleading team together; an experience I will never forget! We both made the team and have been the close of friends ever since. Making new friends wasn’t as hard as I thought it was going to be. Making the cheerleading team came with a lot of great things. The team was very nice and they welcomed me onto the team with open arms. I became captain and so did my friend Leya. Coming onto the cheerleading I thought it was going to be hard to find my place on a new team. I was used to being around with the girls at my old school. However, the transition was very easy and I became comfortable very quickly. When I changed to a new school my perspective changed on the situation.

I made a great best friend that is still my best friend. I made the cheerleading team and made more amazing friends. I had to retake a class but exceeded in it so it was not bad at all. Thinking back on it, if I had not changed schools I do not know how my life would be like. I realized that sometime good things come out of change and a lot good things came out of my situation. From my experience through this journey I learned that when something changes it can be for the better and not always for the worse. So I am thankful till this day.

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Motivation and Change in Schools Essay (Critical Writing)

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Motivation Issues

Change in schools, reference list.

There is no doubt that the education approaches have changed greatly in the XXI century compared to the ones that used to be major advances in the late 90ies. With a major breakthrough in both theory and practice, the pedagogy of the new era is pushing the envelope by offering new educational methodologies that tie in education and other fields. Which is even more inspiring, the latter is aimed not at distilling a perfect teaching method and the ultimate approach, but to discover as many new possibilities in education as possible. However, one thing remains unchanged – providing students with motivation for learning is still the highest priority in the teaching process.

When considering the specifics of learning in the XXI century, one must mention that the key change in the Australian education system concerns the teacher-student relationships. While previously, schools followed a stereotypical model of the teacher only teaching the subject and students only attending classes, in the present-day world, the relationships between teachers and students are viewed through a more objective and pragmatic lens. One might hardly believe that the possibility of a conflict between a teacher and a student and the possible means to tackle this conflict are quite recent additions to the Australian educational program.

Another issue that deserves a thorough discussion is the motivation problem. There is no secret that motivating students is the key priority in the modern education system. However, helping students become invested in a subject is far more difficult than it might actually seem. Nagel’s work offers a lot of food for thoughts concerning the driving force behind the students’ work on their school projects – or a complete lack of motivation, for that matter.

Considering the phenomenon of motivation a behavioral component, the given work explores the student-teacher relationships not only as of the stereotypical disciple-and-mentor relationship but also as a process of getting to know a different person and trying to see the world through the prism of his/her principles. As Nagel explains, the essence of being a teacher is not merely making the students learn the basic information required for the curriculum, but also understanding the students, learning more about their character features and trying to address these specifics of their characters when conveying the key message of the lesson.

According to Nagle, by understanding the way in which the students view reality, a teacher can develop a strategy to motivate the students for further learning and even self-education. Thus, the chapter is devoted to the exploration of the culture of a typical XXI century student, who, as it turns out, is quite different from the students of the previous era.

Providing a number of terms that can help to define the specifics of a modern student, starting with a “digital native” to more complex epithets like “neuroplasticity,” Nagel draws a very precise portrait of a present-day student, therefore, helping the readers approach the concept of motivation for a modern student. Reaching the final stage of his discussion eventually, Nagel provides a very graphic description of what motivates a present-day learner.

According to Nagel’s basic findings, the more a teacher is invested into what interests his/her students, the more motivated the latter become. Therefore, Nagel makes a revolutionary statement that teaching might not be only about helping the students acquire the necessary skills and providing them with the information demanded by the curriculum, but also raising their enthusiasm by taking interest in their opinion, working on a teacher-student bonding and, therefore, raising the students’ motivation in learning.

As it turns out, according to Nagel’s work, motivation is also crucial for creating a specific environment in school. According to Nigel, environmental factors are especially important for neuroplasticity, which means that students are able to absorb new information several times faster and with much more efficacy than when the environment is out of chord with the topic of the lesson or is completely unsuitable for learning and teaching purposes.

It would be wrong, however, to claim that in the past, the motivation issue was never brought up. A comparatively old concept, motivation has been the bulk of numerous educational theories for a long time. In the XXI century, however, motivation seems to have gained an additional connotation, thus, being taken to a completely new level. As Nagel says, student motivation remains the key priority, and by getting involved into the lives of their students, teachers can analyze the factors that stress the students out and, thus, distract them from learning. Once the obstacles are out of the way, the learning process is bound to be successful.

According to what Groundwater-Smith et al. say, several characteristic features of the XXI-century learning and students can be specified. One of the boldest decisions made in the given sphere over the past few decades, according to Groundwater-Smith et al., is the change in the attitudes towards the gender issue in schools. The given change was manifested by the creation of schools where boys and girls could study together, as an alternative to the schools that were designed solely for boys or for girls.

The given change has provided ample opportunities for female students to develop professionally instead of learning the subjects related only to household and leading only to learning to become a housewife. Therefore, Australian education has motivated girls and young women to grow as professionals, stressing the necessity to develop new skills in the competitive environment of the XXI century. As the research conducted by Groundwater-Smith et al. says, the students of the XXI century will have to face the following challenges at school:

• Learning to know.
• Learning to do.
• Learning to live together, learning to live with others.
• Learning to be. (Groundwater-Smith et al., 2009, p. 29)

Another important change that occurred to the Australian educational system and, therefore, its educational establishments was the update on learning programs, as well as the ways in which these programs were implemented (Groundwater-Smith et al., 2009, p. 25).

Rethinking the changes that schools in Australia are undergoing at the moment, one must admit that these changes are inevitable; moreover, they are crucial for the schools’ proper functioning. Although one might find these changes very hard to adjust to, they are still a part of the progress and, therefore, must be accepted. Hence, the teachers’ and students’ ability to adapt to these changes shows the level of involvement of the former and motivation of the latter.

However, in some schools in Australia, the process of adopting the required changes seems to have been somewhat slackened. The given phenomenon can be attributed to the fact that the students do not have the proper motivation to accept the changes and move on with their studying. The reasons beyond this lingering are quite understandable; as the research by Groundwater-Smith et al. says, the process of change involves restructuring not only the relationships between students and teachers but also numerous alterations of the curriculum, changes I the school policy and reconsideration of the school’s financial policy. Hence, not all schools are ready to accept the necessary changes, given the costs that they will have to take. There are many solutions to this problem, yet to most efficient one seems to hold fundraisers.

It would be wrong, however, to claim that the changes that the Australian schools have undergone drastic changes over the past few decades. Compared to the principles adopted in the Australian schools several decades ago, the current innovations are rather unnoticeable, according to what some of the Australian dwellers say: “Oh well, schools are really the same the world over. The teachers are the bosses and the kids learn” (Groundwater-Smith et al., 2009, p.19).

Although the given remark was made in a rather jokingly manner, there is a grain of truth in it – the key principles of learning at school have not changed, i.e., the student-teacher relationships are still based on patronizing and tutoring. The given feature of the modern Australian schools, however, should not be considered regressive; instead, it should be viewed as the fact that the fundamental principles of learning have been upgraded towards new standards of learning and now incorporate not only pedagogical ideas, but also the principles of students’ psychology, organizational behavior, and knowledge management.

Groundwater-Smith, S. et al . (2009). Rethinking today’s secondary school. In S. Groundwater-Smith et al ., Secondary schooling in a changing world (2nd ed.) (pp. 17–37). South Melbourne, Vic.: Cengage Learning. Web.

Nagel. M. C. (2011). Understanding and motivating students. In R. Churchill, P. et al . Understanding and motivating students . Milton, QLD: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Web.

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Why Schools Need to Change. Really.

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This post is by Kristen Vogt, Knowledge Management Officer, Next Generation Learning Challenges.

We’ve moved from the industrial age to the information age.

Technology is transforming the ways we work and live.

Globalization is shifting the types of jobs available in the U.S.

The gig economy is here to stay.

The world is changing, no doubt. But do we really understand these changes and their impact on the lives of students?

With the MyWays project, Next Generation Learning Challenges researched this topic extensively, looking at trends in employment, postsecondary education, social changes that lead to a widening opportunity gap, and new understandings of adolescent development and the role of social capital. The research is available in Part A of the MyWays Student Success Series , Adolescence in an Age of Accelerations .

The trends in employment, learning, and opportunity in the U.S., like the ones highlighted in this post, are sobering. It’s a complicated and risky world, but one that is filled with possibilities if young people are prepared for it.

Changes in Employment

Disappearing entry-level jobs : Technology and automation are affecting the nature of all kinds of jobs, and the MyWays research revealed that, combined with outsourcing, these forces are actually squeezing out the very jobs in which young people typically get their start.

Middle-skill jobs, like brokers, tellers, travel agents, and technicians, as well as junior-level jobs in professions like law, radiology, and computer science, are increasingly harder to find, declining from 58 percent to 44 percent of all jobs over the last 30 years. In The Second Machine Age , Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee refer to this trend as a “gale of creative destruction” that is most impactful on young people, particularly those with the least means and greatest vulnerability.

Experience required: Research like that of Peter Cappelli in Will College Pay Off? concludes that employers today are less likely to hire for potential and more likely to hire for experience. Employers are not spending as much on talent development and on-the-job training as they used to and are more likely to invest in technology solutions and contract labor. The catch-22, “I need experience to get my first job; but I need someone to hire me to get experience” is all too real for today’s young people.

In a trend of tight competition for scarce jobs, even if a job does not require a college degree, the growing number of unemployed and underemployed college graduates edge out high school graduates for those jobs. As Derek Thompson noted in an article in The Atlantic , “In the biggest picture, the job market appears to be requiring more and more preparation for a lower and lower starting wage.” It leaves college graduates underemployed and those with less education with even fewer options.

Given these changes in employment, young people are faced with the daunting task of figuring out how to enter the world of work after high school and college with both training and experience already on their resume.

Changes in Learning

College is not a stepping stone: The costs of postsecondary learning are rising, financial aid is harder to find, and the potential earnings from jobs after graduation are dropping. This makes college an expensive investment with uncertain returns. It’s the most well-known secret that the traditional college experience--high school graduates completing community college in two years or a bachelor’s degree in four years--is the exception, not the norm. See, for example, Learning While Earning , a report from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce. Most students pursuing postsecondary education are older; taking longer to get to a degree, if they earn one at all; and working while learning, often in low-paying jobs that are not relevant to their chosen major or career prospects.

New skills needed to navigate life after high school: Preparing for success in the journey from high school to an early career is much more complicated than ever before. In the MyWays research, NGLC dubbed the decade after high school as the wayfinding decade, because it requires a new kind of agility, navigation, and perseverance. Those aren’t the only new skills young people need: entry-level jobs require new, higher skills , like critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity and more technical skills like coding.

Unfortunately, the uncertainty of the wayfinding decade doesn’t dissipate. Throughout their lifespan, today’s youth will see ongoing change in the availability of jobs, the required training and experience needed to be hired, and the necessary skills to perform those jobs. Did You Know? is a short video about these changes, with compelling statistics like, “The amount of new technical information is doubling every 2 years.... For students starting a technical degree this means that half of what they learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study.” Young people need to adapt quickly and regularly develop new skills in order to create a career over a lifetime. Lifelong learning is a necessity.

Given these changes in learning, young people are faced with the daunting task of figuring out how to develop knowledge, skills, and abilities for multiple jobs--jobs that may not even yet exist--in a more expensive and more confusing postsecondary learning landscape.

Changes in Opportunity

Income defines generations: A prevailing myth in U.S. culture is that if you try hard, regardless of where you came from, you can be successful. But the shifts in technology and the economy discussed above, with roots back to the 1970s, are changing the deal: it is getting harder and harder to move out of poverty. Disappearing middle-skills jobs, the high-cost and low success rates in postsecondary education, and increasing social segregation by race and class are decreasing economic and social mobility. The Great Recession exacerbated these trends, and in spite of a generally rebounding economy the gaps are only getting wider.

Education and employment trends combine to widen the gaps: High school graduation rates for students of color are rising, and though they still lag behind their white peers, trends show this opportunity gap is narrowing. But it’s not making much of a difference. The unemployment rate for high school graduates of color has been over 20 percent since the Great Recession. And while more students of color are going to college, college graduates are more likely to be white and affluent. White and affluent college graduates are more likely to be employed, with unemployment rates half that of black and Hispanic college graduates . The result is greater stratification--a gulf of opportunity--between the haves and the have nots.

Given these changes in opportunity, young people of color and young people from low-income families are faced with the daunting task of figuring out how to combat systemic barriers that are making it increasingly more difficult to succeed.

What Educators Can Do

Redefine Student Success: To address the new skills young people need to navigate postsecondary learning and employment in today’s world, educators can work with their communities to rethink and update the skills and knowledge required for graduation. The changes in employment, learning, and opportunity suggest many deeper learning competencies that are already understood to be important, competencies like problem-solving and critical thinking. The trends also suggest some new ones, like those in the MyWays Wayfinding Abilities domain .

Connect Young People to the World of Work: To address the need for practical work experience and training, educators can provide more robust learning experiences that better connect classroom learning with the real world of adults. There are many ways to do this. MyWays offers several research-based learning designs that connect adolescents to the adult world, particularly through Whole Learning and the Wider Learning Ecosystem.

Drive the Changing World Toward Equity : Responding to the changing world is a big step for K-12 education, a system known more for its stability than its agility. But what if K-12 became a driver of change in its local communities? The forces contributing to the gaps in opportunity are bigger than K-12 can address on its own. Responding to the trends by helping the most vulnerable students navigate the inequities--through learning experiences focused on broader, deeper competencies--won’t break the systems that create advantages and disadvantages to begin with. How might K-12 co-create a thriving, equitable community and build the kind of future we all want for our young people?

The opinions expressed in Learning Deeply are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.

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Growth & Development

How switching schools impacts your child’s development.

Switching schools is a significant event in a child's life. It involves leaving familiar surroundings, teachers, and friends to embark on a journey into an entirely new environment. It can also be challenging for parents. Switching schools can include any time a child changes schools for reasons other than grade advancement, but generally, it refers to changing schools during a school year. It may be voluntary—such as changing schools to participate in a new school choice program—or involuntary, such as being expelled or escaping from bullying. More common, switching schools is often related to when a family moves due to changes in a parent’s job.  In any case, the impact of switching schools extends beyond the immediate disruption. It can profoundly influence a child's development, shaping their academic, social, and emotional growth in numerous ways.

Switching schools is a significant event in a child's life. It involves leaving familiar surroundings, teachers, and friends to embark on a journey into an entirely new environment. It can also be challenging for parents. Switching schools can include any time a child changes schools for reasons other than grade advancement, but generally, it refers to changing schools during a school year. It may be voluntary—such as changing schools to participate in a new program—or involuntary, such as being expelled or escaping bullying. More commonly, switching schools is often related to when a family moves due to changes in a parent’s job. In any case, the impact of switching schools extends beyond the immediate disruption. It can profoundly influence a child's development, shaping their academic, social, and emotional growth in numerous ways.

This article aims to unpack the effects of school transitions, providing a comprehensive understanding of how switching schools can influence your child's development. It will delve into the academic, social, and emotional consequences of school transitions, providing insights and advice on supporting your child during this transition.

The academic impact of switching schools

The academic impact of switching schools can manifest in lower grades, decreased academic engagement, and a heightened risk of dropping out in later years. When switching schools, children might also experience a loss of continuity in learning, as different schools often follow different curricula and teaching approaches. Even normal transitions, such as those experienced when moving to 6th and 9th grades, can cause students to fall behind. Research has found that kids attending K-8 schools have slightly higher academic achievement than those who attended 6-8 grade middle schools.

One of the biggest challenges parents and teachers face when a child switches schools is the continuity of academic records. When children switch schools, it takes a lot of time and effort on the part of parents (and the school) to track down their children's historical academic records, and in some cases, these records are completely lost. It also makes the new teacher’s job much more difficult. This is only exacerbated when switching schools mid-year. When a new child shows up in a classroom mid-year, teachers don’t know anything about what they’ve been doing. For the child, there may be discontinuity in learning environments, goals, and assessments between the old and new schools. This can make it difficult to catch up on coursework because often they miss learning about key concepts in the time lost between transitions.

Since the historical academic records belong to the parents and children, at Beehive, we believe it would be much more efficient if parents had a single secure place to store all their child’s info that stays with them forever. This would enable parents, no matter where their child transfers to, to easily share this info with all the appropriate stakeholders in the new school, including teachers. This would allow the new faculty to get up to speed quickly on the child’s historical performance and how they like to learn to ensure a smoother transition academically.

It's important to note that the academic impact of switching schools is not always negative. In some cases, the new school might offer better academic opportunities, a more conducive learning environment, or teaching methods that align better with the child's learning style.

The social and emotional consequences when switching schools

The social and emotional consequences of switching schools can often be just as profound as the academic impacts. Children derive a sense of belonging and identity from their school environment. Leaving this environment can disrupt their sense of identity, leading to feelings of loss and disorientation.

The process of forming new friendships can also be challenging and stressful. Children may feel lonely and isolated as they navigate the social dynamics of their new school. They may also experience bullying or exclusion, which can obviously have lasting emotional consequences.

Despite these challenges, switching schools does provide opportunities for social and emotional growth. It can expose children to diverse social environments, fostering empathy, adaptability, and other key social skills. It can also provide them with experiences of overcoming social challenges, building their resilience, and enhancing their emotional intelligence.

How to support your child's development during a school transition

Supporting your child during a school transition involves facilitating their academic transition, providing emotional support, and helping them navigate their new social environment. Open communication is key. Discuss their feelings, worries, and expectations about the new school. Also, reassure them that feeling anxious or uncertain during a transition is normal.

To support their academic transition, familiarize yourself with the curriculum and teaching methods of the new school. Help your child organize their study schedule, and provide them with resources to catch up on any missed material.

Beehive can help parents facilitate this transition. As your single parenting management app we ensure that your child’s academic record stays with you forever. This will help you stay more informed on how your child is doing and progressing. It can also serve as an easy way to share this information (should you choose) with the new school and new teacher. This can help you all stay on the same page and work together toward a smooth academic and mental transition for your child. And don’t forget, our Growth Plans are also an effective tool to assist your child in getting caught up on missed learning content and will ensure they stay on track during any transition.

For social support, encourage your child to participate in extracurricular activities and social events at the new school. This can help them form new friendships and feel part of the school community. If your child experiences bullying or social exclusion, seek help from the school's support services.

Make switching schools a positive experience for your child

Switching schools is a significant transition that can profoundly influence a child's development. While it presents challenges, it also offers opportunities for growth and resilience. By understanding the effects of switching schools, considering the relevant factors, and providing the necessary support, parents can help make the transition a positive experience for their children.

Every child is unique, and their experiences and reactions to switching schools will vary. However, with the right support and resources, your child can successfully navigate this transition and emerge stronger and more resilient. As a parent, your understanding, patience, and support are the pillars that will guide them through this journey.