Characteristics Associated with Effective Public High Schools

This study identifies the school characteristics that are associated with four cognitive achievement measures for students during their last two years of high school. The study uses the High School and Beyond (HSB) data on 18,684 public high school sophomore students who participated in the 1980 base-year and 1982 follow-up study. Over 800 public schools across the country are included in the analyses. This study uses the longitudinal data for the sophomore cohort in evaluating the major factors associated with school variation in verbal, mathematics, science, and a composite performance measure. Results from this study revealed that gains were greater in those schools where a large percentage of students were enrolled in the academic curriculum and in the schools which offered a large number of additional courses beyond the remediation level. The quantity of instruction that a student took beyond the remedial level was positively related to test score gain. The school effects were significant but small in explaining total school variation. One factor that may explain the small school effects is that the cognitive measures used in this study may not be sensitive to detect differences that might exist between public schools in their effects on student achievement during the junior and senior years of high school.