The American High School Graduation Rate: Trends and Levels

This paper uses multiple data sources and a unified methodology to estimate the trends and levels of the U.S. high school graduation rate. Correcting for important biases that plague previous calculations, we establish that (a) the true high school graduation rate is substantially lower than the official rate issued by the National Center for Educational Statistics; (b) it has been declining over the past 40 years; (c) majority/minority graduation rate differentials are substantial and have not converged over the past 35 years; (d) the decline in high school graduation rates occurs among native populations and is not solely a consequence of increasing proportions of immigrants and minorities in American society; (e) the decline in high school graduation explains part of the recent slowdown in college attendance; and (f) the pattern of the decline of high school graduation rates by gender helps to explain the recent increase in male-female college attendance gaps.

Le français dans le monde

Titre de l'écran-titre (visionné le 16 nov. 2006)Publ. comme: no spécial, janvier 2002 de la revue Le français dans le mond

Taking the Easy Way Out: How the GED Testing Program Induces Students to Drop Out

We exploit an exogenous increase in General Educational Development (GED) testing requirements to determine whether raising the difficulty of the test causes students to finish high school rather than drop out and GED certify. We find that a six point decrease in GED pass rates induces a 1.3 point decline in overall dropout rates. The effect size is also much larger for older students and minorities. Finally, a natural experiment based on the late introduction of the GED in California reveals, that adopting the program increased the dropout rate by 3 points more relative to other states during the mid-1970s.GED, dropout

Sharp bounds on Helmholtz impedance-to-impedance maps and application to overlapping domain decomposition

We prove sharp bounds on certain impedance-to-impedance maps (and their compositions) for the Helmholtz equation with large wavenumber (i.e., at high frequency) using semiclassical defect measures. Gong et al. (Numer. Math. 152:2 (2022), 259–306) recently showed that the behaviour of these impedance-to-impedance maps (and their compositions) dictates the convergence of the parallel overlapping Schwarz domain-decomposition method with impedance boundary conditions on the subdomain boundaries. For a model decomposition with two subdomains and sufficiently large overlap, the results of this paper combined with those of Gong et al. show that the parallel Schwarz method is power contractive, independent of the wavenumber. For strip-type decompositions with many subdomains, the results of this paper show that the composite impedance-to-impedance maps, in general, behave “badly” with respect to the wavenumber; nevertheless, by proving results about the composite maps applied to a restricted class of data, we give insight into the wavenumber-robustness of the parallel Schwarz method observed in the numerical experiments of Gong et al.</p