ABSTRACT
The assessment of schools and schooling is a very complicated issue in part because educational outcomes are a function of a great number of interrelated influences which must be measured and accounted for in analyses of student achievement. In this chapter, the author analyses the High School and Beyond (HS&B) and the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988-1994 data sets. These two longitudinal studies contain representative samples of American sophomores in 1980 and 1990, and thus provide a rare opportunity for comparative studies of achievement levels across time. To more adequately address questions of how American student achievement has changed over time, the author analyses based upon nationally representative samples of students at multiple time points and which include measures of individual, family, and school background characteristics. Students' educational goals and efforts to realize them may also have changed from 1980 to 1990, making it important to compare the achievement of students by their educational expectation and high school program.
