Advanced placement (AP) and concurrent enrollment (CE) provide high school students with rigorous coursework and possible college credit. Theoretical modeling predicted students would substitute CE for AP courses conditional on their probability of earning university credit, passing AP tests, and college selectivity despite CE costing more than…

As part of their strategies to increase college readiness and reduce educational inequalities, at least 29 states subsidize Advanced Placement (AP) exam fees for low-income students. However, while Michigan's state-level policy subsidized low-income student exams to $5 per exam, we found wide-ranging fee structures at high schools--from $0 to $50.…

This study has a dual purpose: (1) to show how computer-assisted discourse analysis of a 1.5-million-word specialized corpus can uncover patterns of language use that provide insights into the beliefs and values of a particular social group, making possible a "new way of looking at old puzzles" (Stubbs, 2010); and (2) to examine how the…

The paper explores important issues in today's education, not by analyses and statistics, but by projecting readers into the future and then asking them to look back on today's schools and to act like archaeologists--to surmise from all sorts of things they can observe, what was really important to us, what we really valued, how we treated kids,…

The International Baccalaureate may sound like it involves some sort of foreign exchange and a college graduation ceremony, but the IB is actually a comprehensive, demanding, and increasingly popular diploma program for high school juniors and seniors, with a strong academic focus on the world around them. While the IB was created 40 years ago by…

As the economic outlook continues to darken, school districts will be looking for ways to cut costs, and they will no doubt wrestle with some difficult issues. When does it make sense to keep classes small? When does it make sense to increase class sizes to cut costs? Such debates are often carried out in the absence of information about what…