The Student Success Initiative (SSI) established, in 1999, various promotional gates for students to pass the state-mandated high-stakes assessment test known as the Texas Assessment of Knowledge & Skills (TAKS), administered in the areas of reading for third graders and of reading and math for fifth graders. Largely perceived as antisocial promotion legislation, outcomes of the SSI implementation did not seem to coincide with their original intentions. To ascertain the veracity of this claim, interviews were scheduled with a variety of local level stakeholders serving as decision-making participants in a structure known as the grade placement committee. Grade placement committee members address student promotion and retention decisions when students do not meet the passing standards for the TAKS tests. Because the SSI is still recent in its implementation, to date there is not a wide body of research examining the stakeholder perceptions of the SSI and of their role in the decision-making process for student retention and promotion. To this end, several interviews were conducted with teachers, with parents, and with campus or district-level administrators. The interviews served to gauge the stakeholder perceptions regarding their role in the grade placement committee itself as decision-makers and also their perceptions or their experiences regarding how often or likely students are to be promoted or to be retained in the context of the grade placement committee meetings. The participants also spoke about their views regarding the effectiveness of the SSI and the outcomes of its implementation. The research participants spoke to their personal experiences with student retention and promotion. The stakeholders' views range from the perception that the SSI puts students at risk of failure, actually causing students to be promoted more often to the opinion that the SSI does hold both the teacher and the parents more accountable for student success. Several broad themes emerged from the data. The themes of perceived power, underlying or unwritten agendas and a call for change due to dissatisfaction with the current system were evident upon the examination of the data.

This study examined which predictor measures best explain first grade retention in Texas, using three campus configuration types. Predictor measures were chosen from Texas public school campus student demographic and operational data, as well as community-based early childhood program data. Prior to this study, no research had been conducted in Texas that merged public school-based early childhood program data with community-based early childhood program data in order to understand a historical and often neglected problem in the state's education system: the number of students being held back in first grade. To determine which predictor measures best explained first grade retention among selected campus configuration types, a hierarchical regression analysis was conducted. Initially, public school campuses that did not contain early childhood and/or pre- kindergarten programs in their campus configuration, and that generally served students with fewer risks for academic and social failure, had lower first grade retention rates, which were statistically significant. After controlling for multiple campus student demographic and operational predictor measures, as well as access to community-based early childhood programs per first grade student, however, campuses that contained early childhood and pre-kindergarten programs, or a combination of both, had retention rates that were no longer statistically different from the campus configurations that, on average, contained fewer economically disadvantaged and at-risk students. Although the study was a systems-level analysis and was restricted to making inferences at the aggregate level that were non-causal, the findings provided several clues that suggest early childhood programs and experiences, both internal and external to public school campuses, have the potential to affect the short- and long-term academic success of vulnerable children. The study encouraged collaboration between the public school system and a complex, diverse community-based early childhood system, using a "vulnerable neighborhood approach" (Bruner,2007), as one effective strategy for promoting school readiness and success for disadvantaged children, and as one means to address this challenge. / text