Theory and Application of Early Warning Systems for High School and Beyond

Abstract

This article describes the development of early warning indicators for high school and beyond in the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) by the Value-Added Research Center (VARC) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, working in conjunction with staff from the Division of Research and Evaluation at MPS. Our work in MPS builds on prior early warning work by using both preexisting and new district data sets to build predictive models for identifying students at elevated risk of an entire series of adverse outcomes in high school and beyond, beginning with grade 9 retention and continuing into postsecondary education. This early warning work in MPS makes at least 2 significant contributions to the existing base of research: (a) broadening the set of outcomes that early warning work can predict; and (b) investigating new ways of conveying early warning information to practitioners, such as probability estimates for each outcome and the total quality credits (TQC) measure.