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The mission of the University of Wisconsin System is to provide Wisconsin's high school graduates with opportunities to cultivate "intellectual, cultural, and humane sensitivities, scientific, professional and technological expertise, and a sense of purpose." Further, as part of its 2020 strategic plan to meet state workforce needs, the System seeks to increase the number of Wisconsinites who both start college and persist to earn their degree. To reach these goals, high school graduates must first apply for admission to the UW System's two- or four-year institutions. This report analyzes application patterns among Wisconsin high school students who earned their high school diploma in 2016. We find that, among students with similar high school grades and ACT scores, Black students are more likely to apply to a UW System school (and to UW-Madison in particular) than otherwise similar non-Hispanic White students. Economically disadvantaged students and students from rural school districts, on the other hand, are less likely to apply to a UW System school or to UW-Madison, though differences are relatively modest in magnitude. If Wisconsin wants to increase equity in who applies to our public colleges and universities, we suggest targeting outreach to academically successful students eligible for free or reduced-priced lunch, and those attending rural high schools.

This report presents a snapshot of selected features of the condition of education in Wisconsin in 2019. With support from the U.S. Department of Education's Institute for Education Sciences, and in collaboration with colleagues at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI), the authors set out to measure practices in PK-12 education that they considered especially important for educational equity and success for children in Wisconsin. Public school teachers and administrators in Wisconsin are responsible for educating about 855,000 students between four-year-old kindergarten and twelfth grade. State report cards produced annually by the Wisconsin DPI show how well we are doing as a school system with respect to student outcomes. In this paper, we focus on what principals and teachers in the state are doing. How do kindergarten teachers at both the four-year-old and five-year-old levels engage in play in their classrooms? How do elementary teachers group students for instruction and how frequently do they reconsider these groupings? What sorts of educational opportunities do teachers and schools offer their English language learners and their students with special needs? How supported do teachers feel in their early years in the profession? These are just a few of the questions we asked a representative sample of almost 700 principals and 2,200 teachers in the state. This paper offers a big picture view of instructional practice and educational opportunity in Wisconsin. It makes no claims about what schools and teachers should do to increase equity and success for students in Wisconsin. Instead, it shines a light on the many ways our educators work to support students in the state and, we hope, offers insights into where we might do better.

Recent work has broadened the scope of school effectiveness research to consider not only academic achievement but also other outcomes, especially college attendance. This literature has argued that high schools are an important determinant of college attendance, with some contending that high schools matter more for college attendance than for academic achievement. A separate branch of research has illustrated how place-based opportunities facilitate college attendance. We merge these two literatures by asking if schools' geographic context can explain apparent variation in effectiveness among Wisconsin high schools. We find that geographic context explains more than a quarter of the variance in traditional estimates of school effectiveness on college attendance, because factors like proximity to colleges are strongly associated with college attendance. Accounting for geography is therefore important in order not to overstate high schools' role in higher education outcomes. Results are based on multilevel models applied to rich administrative data on every Wisconsin public high school entrant between 2006 and 2011. [This is the online version of an article published in "Research in Higher Education" May 2020.]

In 2015, Wisconsin began mandating the ACT college entrance exam and the WorkKeys career readiness assessment. With population-level data and several quasi-experimental designs, we assess how this policy affected college attendance. We estimate a positive policy effect for middle/high-income students, no effect for low-income students, and greater effects at high schools that had lower ACT participation before the policy. We further find little evidence that being deemed college-ready by one's ACT scores or career-ready by one's WorkKeys scores affects college attendance probabilities. Pragmatically, the findings highlight the policy's excellence and equity consequences, which are complex given that the policy has principally helped advantaged students. Theoretically, the findings shed light on students' (dis)inclinations to update educational beliefs in light of new signals. [This is the online version of an article published in "Educational Researcher."]

In Wisconsin, racial disparities in K-12 achievement have taken center stage, and justifiably so: the black-white and Hispanic-white test score gap is wider in Wisconsin than in any other state (Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, 2014). However, Wisconsin also sees inequality along economic lines and disparities in postsecondary outcomes, both of which warrant attention. If Wisconsin is like the rest of the nation, closing its gaps in academic achievement is not sufficient to equalize educational attainment. Nationally and in Wisconsin, economically disadvantaged high school graduates attend college, especially baccalaureate colleges, at much lower rates than their more advantaged peers. Schools play an important role in helping economically disadvantaged students go to college. In this report, the authors describe Wisconsin's economic disparities by postsecondary outcomes, assess the magnitude of between-school variation in school effects on economically disadvantaged students' baccalaureate college attendance, and show which school characteristics explain this variation. To determine which types of schools are more successful in sending economically disadvantaged students to baccalaureate colleges, this study uses a relatively dense set of student-level and school-level characteristics. The authors draw these data from the population of Wisconsin public school students who entered ninth grade for the first time between the 2006-07 and 2011-12 school years. Three principal questions guide this study: (1) How large are economic disparities in college attendance in Wisconsin?; (2) How much variation is there among high schools in the share of their low-income students who attend college, controlling for student characteristics?; and (3) Which high school characteristics explain this between-school variation? The questions are approached using the Wisconsin State Longitudinal Data System, the National Student Clearinghouse, and the National Center for Education Statistics' Common Core of Data. This report proceeds in six sections. First, the authors describe their data sources and measurement strategies. Second, they show the magnitude of economic disparities in postsecondary outcomes in Wisconsin. Third, they demonstrate that school effects vary widely. Fourth, they present estimates of how specific school-level characteristics influence low-income students' postsecondary outcomes, highlighting the importance of geographic characteristics such as location in a suburb, proximity to a University of Wisconsin (UW) 4-year campus, and the education level of adults in the district. Fifth, they examine facets of school organization. Finally, the authors offer concluding comments.