Persisting Students in Different Spaces: A Comparative Analysis

• In Event: The Promise of Persistence: Expanding the Evidence on High School Completion

Abstract

Objective:
To date, the work on persisting students has focused on students in specific geographic regions. For instance, researchers have examined the experiences and outcomes of persisting students in individual districts such as Baltimore and New York City (Hill & Mirakhur, 2018; Uretsky, 2019) as well as across the state of Maryland (Uretsky & Henneberger, 2020). While these separate studies enable us to understand persisting students and draw important lessons about their school experiences and outcomes, they each rely on slightly different definitions (of persisting students) in order to answer related, but different questions. In this paper, we use the same framework to study the characteristics and outcomes of persisting students in two different districts: Wake County Public Schools (in North Carolina) and NYC.

Theoretical framework:
Drawing on the neighborhood and school effects literature, we argue that the proportion of persisting students, the types of school experiences they have, as well as their high school completion outcomes are likely related to salient features of their local environment. In particular, the existing literature points to the importance of three key factors: requirements for earning a high school diploma, the composition of students’ schools, and the types of resources--including socioemotional supports--they are able to access (Hill & Mirakhur, 2018; Rumberger, 2011; Uretsky & Henneberger, 2020). By examining persisting students in different contexts, we aim to explore which, if any, of these three factors are important for persisting students’ success.

Methods and data sources:
We use administrative data from the Wake County Public School System and the NYC Department of Education. In Wake County, our analytic sample includes 67,306 students who began their high school careers between 2003 and 2011. Of this group, just over 6,100 were identified as persisting students (in their fifth year of high school). Our NYC data includes over 600,000 students from the same cohorts with 130,758 students identified as persisters. We conduct descriptive and inferential analyses (OLS regressions with year fixed effects and standard errors clustered by school) to examine the association between persisting students’ characteristics and their high school graduation and college enrollment outcomes.

Results:
Two overarching themes emerge from our analyses. First, persisting students in both Wake County and NYC tend to include disproportionately more students who identify as male, Black, or Latinx. Put differently, overrepresented among persisting students in both places are students who have historically been underserved by our educational system. Second, individual characteristics, in both sets of data, have small and negative relationships with persisting students’ outcomes, particularly for college enrollment. For example, persisting students with a history or chronic absenteeism--in both Wake County and NYC--are less likely to even enroll in a postsecondary institution.

Significance:
Understanding persisting students is important if we are serious about mitigating inequities in high school completion. These results help us move forward in a way that accounts for the various contextual conditions that might be important for persisting students in different places.

Authors

• Zitsi Mirakhur, University of Kentucky

• Elc Estrera, Wake County Public School System