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Home > CES Small Schools Project > Research
COLLEGE MATRICULATION, PERSISTENCE AND GRADUATION
Graduates are among the most valuable sources of information for schools committed to developing educational programs that make an enduring difference in students' lives. College attendance or mere graduation from high school are often taken as valuable indicators of a student's accomplishments in high school. But these are relatively thin indicators of the contribution of high school to youth development. We are interested in looking more deeply at whether graduates of these high schools-which serve mostly students of color and low-income students-are successful in college. This study will attempt to follow graduates through their college experience.
Following high schools students through college and beyond is a relatively infrequent research study. A number of CES schools have done so, including Central Park East (Bensman, D. 1994. Lives of the Graduates of Central Park East Elementary School: Where Have They Gone? What Did They Really Learn? New York: National Center from Restructuring Education, Schools, & Teaching. Teachers College, Columbia University) and the New York Performance Consortium, a group of 28 CES small schools in New York City. CES is currently exploring the idea of conducting a large scale research study in the tradition of the Eight Year Study.
The Eight Year Study is a landmark in educational research. In 1933, the Progressive Education Association (PEA) brought together a group of 30 "experimental" schools and launched a massive Eight-Year Study of students' experience and achievement in and beyond these schools. Seeking to redefine the rigid college admissions criteria that structured traditional high schools, PEA's Commission on the Relation of School and College secured commitments from more than 300 select colleges to admit students from these progressive schools using alternative assessments. Freed from college requirements, the 30 high schools developed their own curriculum and organization, supported by PEA project staff and annual meetings that helped create and sustain a powerful learning network of progressive educators. To study the impact of their work, PEA assembled a group of researchers, led by Ralph Tyler, to conduct a longitudinal evaluation of the impact of these schools on students' lives through college. Based a rigorous matched sample of students from traditional high schools attending the same colleges, the study concluded that students from progressive schools performed better academically, displayed higher intellectual curiosity, were more actively concerned about world issues, and were more resourceful in new situations. They also found that the more experimental the high school a student attended, the more successful the student was in college (Chamberlin et al, 1942).
Page last updated: June 23, 2006
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