The nexus between migration and academic performance is complex and difficult to extricate. Not only are there several factors affecting academic performance, but also many of these factors are confounding, making it difficult to identify and isolate in order to address. Furthermore, the discourse appears silent on the nexus between child…

Curricula at most colleges and universities in the United States are scheduled according to quarters or semesters. While each schedule has several potential advantages over the other, it is unclear what effect each has on student performance. This study compares biology student performance during the two and a half years before and after the 1999…

The 2016 Presidential election and the first months of the Trump administration have propelled immigration to the center of U.S. political debates. We use data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012 to provide insights into the school experiences of high school-age immigrants and their U.S.-born peers. Our findings…

Educational institutions and governing practices are increasingly augmented with digital database technologies that function as new kinds of policy instruments. This article surveys and maps the landscape of digital policy instrumentation in education and provides two detailed case studies of new digital data systems. The Learning Curve is a…

Massive population shift is a current global reality--especially given some of the latest development on European shores; some are calling it a humanitarian crisis. Although the United States (US) receives a large number of immigrants (documented and not) and about 70,000 refugees each year, it is certainly not the only nation to do so.…

Turnaround Arts is a public-private partnership that aims to test the hypothesis that strategically implementing high-quality and integrated arts education programming in high-poverty, chronically underperforming schools adds significant value to school-wide reform. In 2014, the Turnaround Arts initiative completed an evaluation report covering…

Despite the relatively large number of students enrolled in Ohio's virtual schools, it is unclear how virtual schools compare to their traditional school counterparts on measures of student achievement. To provide some insight, we compared the school performance from 2007-2011 at Ohio's virtual and traditional schools. The results suggest that…

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) was designed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to evaluate the quality, equity, and efficiency of school systems around the world. Specifically, the PISA has assessed 15-year-old students' reading, mathematics, and science literacy on a 3-year cycle, since…

Secretary of Education Duncan (2010) lamented the state of U.S. education in 2010 after the release of the results from the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). He wrote: "Unfortunately, the 2009 PISA results show that American students are poorly prepared to compete in today's knowledge economy. President Obama has…

The adoption of personalized learning approaches has increased significantly in recent years. This report examines achievement in 62 public charter and district schools that are pursuing a variety of personalized learning practices, and examines implementation details in 32 of those schools. Researchers obtained achievement data for personalized…

News media often publish comparative studies that report U.S. student performance in a global context. The school quality concern seems so simplistic that anyone who had compulsory education can chime into the discussion. In this article, the condition of U.S. education is further disentangled across the boundary of K-12 and higher education. Core…

The 6-yr degree-completion rate of undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors at U.S. colleges and universities is less than 40%. Persistence among women and underrepresented minorities (URMs), including African-American, Latino/a, Native American, and Pacific Islander students, is even more troubling, as these…

The 2013-2014 North Carolina Pre-Kindergarten (NC Pre-K) Evaluation study was designed to examine the longitudinal outcomes through kindergarten for children who attended the Pre-K program, along with comparisons to previous cohorts of program attendees. A sample of 561 children was included in the study, with data gathered at the beginning and…

Articulation agreements between colleges and universities, whereby students with two-year college diplomas can receive advancement toward a four-year university degree, are provincially mandated in some Canadian provinces and highly encouraged in others. In this study, we compared learning in college transfer and direct-entry from high school…

Success for All (SFA), one of the best-known school reform models, aims to improve the reading skills of all children but is especially directed at schools that serve large numbers of students from low-income families. First implemented in 1987, SFA combines a challenging reading program, whole-school reform elements, and an emphasis on continuous…