On Track Through High School

By: Molly Pileggi, Sean Vannata, Alyn Turner, Theodore Wills, and Roland Reyes July 2024 View This Brief In Pennsylvania, high school students must now demonstrate career or postsecondary preparedness to graduate. Two of the five...

By: Sean Vannata, Anna Shaw-Amoah, Molly Pileggi, Molly Schlesinger, Theodore Wills, Roland Reyes, and Alyn Turner

October 2022

Beginning with the class of 2023, Pennsylvania high school students will need to demonstrate career or postsecondary preparedness to meet statewide graduation requirements and receive a diploma. The new graduation requirements, enacted in 2018 by Pennsylvania’s Act 158, are intended to codify high standards for all students and improve student achievement across Pennsylvania while also taking into account student strengths, interests, and career goals.

Beginning with the class of 2023, graduating Pennsylvania high school students will need to demonstrate career or postsecondary preparedness in addition to meeting existing statewide graduation requirements. Read our policy brief to learn about the history of this “high stakes” policy, how research shaped its evolution, and what researchers suggest are its implications for equity in Pennsylvania.

The purpose of this FAQ is to share what PERC has learned and how our research has been used to help high school students. As high school students return to school buildings post-pandemic, we also talk about how research might be used next year to support equitable pathways to graduation.

By: Molly Pileggi, Alyn Turner, Lindsey Liu, and Jason Fontana

November 2020

This study provides a snapshot of the district’s school-year credit recovery utilization—including eligibility, enrollment, and completion—using newly available data for high school students who entered the 2018–19 school year with a record of one or more failed courses.

By: Molly Pileggi, Lindsey Liu, and Alyn Turner

August 2020

Building upon this prior work, this report examines two of those same cohorts of off-track freshman in the expected graduating classes of 2017 and 2018, following them over time to understand which students were able to graduate and when they got back on track.

By: Molly Pileggi, Kendra Strouf

October 2018

This brief extends analyses from the earlier report with data from two additional cohorts of first-time freshmen (the Classes of 2017 and 2018) to better understand whether the patterns described in the original report have been consistent over time.

By: Austin Slaughter, Ruth Curran Neild, Molly Crofton

July 2018

This study examines what can be known about entering ninth graders, based on their eighth grade school records, that can inform high schools about students’ likelihood of being on track at the end of their first year.

By: Molly Crofton, Ruth Curran Neild

May 2018

This study applies the 2018 Ninth Grade On-Track Definition to students who were first-time ninth graders in the SDP during the 2015-16 or 2016-17 school years.