Full Report - Center for Collaborative Education

Exclusions
The following cases were excluded from the database:
• Cases with BPS start dates after June 30, 2009.
These cases were removed because their start
dates were after the end of the study period. In
addition, none of these cases had any MCAS
or MEPA test data and most had 0 days of attendance
(DOE017) and 1 day of membership
(DOE018) in BPS or 1 day of attendance and 1
day of membership in BPS.
• Cases enrolled in schools not under the authority
of BPS. These schools included schools in other
districts, parochial and secular private schools,
and SPED schools. Many of these schools had
enrollments of fewer than 30 students from our
original data pull.
• Cases whose SIMS codes revealed that the
students were not actually enrolled in a given
school year. Students who had 0 days of attendance
and 1 day of membership (0-1” students)
were excluded from the operational database.
For SY2009, there were no “0-1” students.
The research team deemed this to be a clerical
error and instead removed cases with 1 day of
attendance and 1 day of membership for that
school year only. Cases with an attendance code
of “555” were also removed, as this is the code
SIMS uses to indicate summer events (e.g., summer
graduation, summer dropouts, and summer
transfers).
All of these cases were removed because their
inclusion would have provided an inaccurate count
of the number of students actually enrolled in
BPS during a given school year and would have
artificially skewed data findings. Although these
cases were removed from the operational database
and excluded in analyses, they were included in
the dropout analysis, as explained later on in this
appendix. All exclusions were made in consultation
with OELL, with the goal of providing an accurate
capture of the BPS student enrollment from SY2006
to SY2009.
Construction of new variables
A list of all student variables included in our analysis,
their source, and how they were defined and
constructed appears in Table 1.
108 Improving Educational Outcomes of English Language Learners in Schools and Programs in Boston Public Schools