In districts across the country, school practitioners rely on early warning indicator systems (EWI) to identify students in need of support to graduate high school and be prepared for college. By organizing pieces of data on student performance into indicators, practitioners can develop and test school strategies to improve students' educational attainment with data that are readily available, making indicator systems a potentially powerful tool for supporting student outcomes. While the use of indicators for reaching school and district goals around students' educational attainment has been widely embraced, it is not always clear how to do so in ways that will lead to better educational attainment for students. Questions about how to use indicator systems effectively generally focus on: 1) How are indicators used to improve high school and college graduation rates, and 2) Which indicators should be the focus of an early warning or college readiness indicator system? These questions are intertwined. Decisions about which indicators are the best indicators to use depend on how they are being used, and questions about how to use indicators depend on the choice of indicators. This paper provides a brief overview of the current state of the use of indicators for improving students' educational attainment, considerations about which indicators to use when developing an indicator system, and some of the questions that have arisen as schools, districts, and states engage in these efforts. It is intended for people who are positioned between the research and practice spheres, such as district and state institutional researchers, or researchers at universities and research organizations who work closely with schools and districts. It may also be of interest to school and district administrators with a strong interest in developing and refining high school graduation and college readiness indicator systems, and an interest in the data and research behind such systems.
About the Author: ELAINE M. ALLENSWORTH is the Executive Director of the UChicago Consortium. She conducts research on factors affecting school improvement and students' educational attainment, including high school graduation, college readiness, curriculum and instruction, and school organization and leadership. JENNY NAGAOKA is the Deputy Director of the UChicago Consortium. Her current work uses linked quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the relationship among high school preparation, college choice, and post-secondary outcomes for CPS students. DAVID W. JOHNSON is a Senior Research Analyst at the UChicago Consortium. His research interests focus on school culture and climate, school improvement and processes of institutional change, and post-secondary access and attainment for urban students. His dissertation research focuses on how high schools become socially organized to improve college-going among low-income, minority, and first-generation college students. The University of Chicago Consortium on School Research (UChicago Consortium) builds the capacity for school reform by conducting research that identifies what matters for student success and school improvement. Created in 1990, UChicago Consortium conducts research of high technical quality that can inform and assess policy and practice in the Chicago Public Schools. UChicago Consortium studies also have informed broader national movements in public education. UChicago Consortium encourages the use of research in policy action and improvement of practice but does not argue for particular policies or programs. Rather, UChicago Consortium helps to build capacity for school reform by identifying what matters for student success and school improvement, creating critical indicators to chart progress, and conducting theory-driven evaluation to identify how programs and policies are working.