Accreditation can serve as an accountability mechanism for higher education, ensuring institutions meet specific standards, which can be impacted by various factors including the regulatory environment of each country or local jurisdiction as well as an institution's mission, enrollment, and student success trends. In addition, higher education…

There have been articles about the competitiveness of elite colleges and universities and the need to provide courses or partial courses or seminars in failure. The idea is legitimizing failure; it happens to everyone after all. But, since some college students have never experienced failure, the colleges need to include instruction on how to…

School ratings are a ubiquitous feature of the U.S. educational system. Alongside state-mandated measures of school performance, non-state organizations such as GreatSchools.org and Niche have created consumer-oriented systems of school ratings that draw on publicly available information about schools. Claiming the purpose of their rating systems…

Can place-based college scholarships stimulate local prosperity? Research suggests that Promise programs can indeed contribute to revitalizing economically distressed communities. We argue that these scholarship programs, when leveraged effectively, can spawn a host of community benefits and serve as catalysts for economic and educational…

Purpose: The purpose of the paper is to discuss some of the mysteries around the much-touted recent success of school education in China and to explore some of the key conditions that may underpin the success. Design/Approach/Methods: It is a conceptual paper. A wide range of available data and literature has been consulted and analyzed to…

Grades are the fundamental currency of our educational system; they signal academic achievement and noncognitive skills to parents, employers, postsecondary gatekeepers, and students themselves. Grade inflation compromises the signaling value of grades and undermines their capacity to achieve the functions for which they are intended. We challenge…

What does it mean when a school, having rejected a child who applied for admission, explains that he or she just "isn't a good fit" with the school? At times, it is not clear how the decision to prevent a child from enrolling is best described as a lack of fit, particularly if the school's goals and priorities (a) correspond to what most parents…

For more than a century, urban public schools have provided economic opportunities through education to some of the nation's largest, most diverse, and neediest populations. By embracing these challenges, our nation's urban schools have provided the know-how and backbone upon which our cities have grown and thrived. In this report, the Council of…

While the introduction of NAPLAN in 2008 has always been a source of contention for many teachers, and is regarded by some as an expression of bureaucratic control and therefore a challenge to professional autonomy, the development of the My School Website provided a more serious threat. This publication of school performances is viewed by many…

This paper describes how a locally developed school ranking system affected student enrolment patterns in British Columbia over time. In developing an annual school "report card" that was published in newspapers and online, the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute created a marketplace for school choice by devising an accountability scheme…

Last July, the Atlanta Public Schools became the poster district for teachers and principals behaving badly. State investigators found that, in 44 schools across the city, 178 teachers and administrators had systematically cheated on the state standardized tests taken by their students in 2009. The largest cheating scandal by far has cast a pall…

A few years ago, in "Student Success in College (SSiC)," the authors profiled twenty colleges and universities that were unusually effective in fostering student engagement and success, defined as better-than-predicted scores on the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and better-than-predicted graduation rates. These schools are…

The electrical engineering (ELE) program at the American University of Sharjah (AUS) is designed to fulfill the ABET criteria. Several assessment tools are used to qualitatively and quantitatively measure the level of achievement of the program's educational objectives and outcomes. These tools include alumni, employer, and graduate advisor…

A recent review of data provided by the New York City Department of Education reveals that African-American charter school students were 60 percent more likely than their public school counterparts to earn a seat in one of New York City's specialized high schools in 2009. For Hispanics, the rate of acceptance was twice as high for charter school…

Can all the universities that claim to be "world-class" actually live up to the claim? If they could, would that be desirable public policy? It could be that there are so many different meanings of "world-class" that the term in practical effect is an oxymoron: the definition of "world" is determined locally when conceptually it should be defined…