Upward Bound is a federally funded program designed to prepare economically and educationally disadvantaged high school students for postsecondary education. Each year, approximately thirty-three thousand students are served by the more than four hundred Upward Bound programs. Several studies have documented the success of Upward Bound programs in…

Historically, rural schools have been geographically and politically isolated to the extent that some might say that they have been the victims of, or beneficiaries from, an unstated government policy of benign neglect. Recently, conditions and relationships have changed with the enactment of state and federal accountability legislation and legal…

The purpose of this study was to examine the variables that are associated with the percentage of students who pass Tennessee's Gateway exams in high school. Associations were examined between the Gateway exams and variables such as: socioeconomic status, ethnicity, dropout rate, graduation rate, attendance, average daily membership, per-pupil…

The vast disparities in college attendance and graduation rates between students from different class backgrounds is a growing social concern. "Economic Inequality and Higher Education" investigates the connection between income inequality and unequal access to higher education, and proposes solutions that the state and federal governments and…

What accounts for the differences in retention and graduation rates among large public colleges and universities that serve high numbers of low-income students? To answer this question, the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education has conducted two studies to examine the institutional characteristics, practices, and policies…

Using the national data from high school transcript studies conducted from 1982 to 2005, this special analysis addresses the following questions related to students' coursetaking patterns and trends during this period: (1) What do states require and what do schools offer for coursework?; (2) How many course credits do students earn by high school…

The Center on Education Policy (CEP) has been studying state high school exit examinations since 2002. This is the sixth annual report on our comprehensive study of exit exams. The information comes from several sources: our survey of states that have mandatory exit exams, interviews with state officials, media reports, state Web sites, and case…

The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education's report,"Measuring Up 2006: The National Report Card on Higher Education" found that among 27 industrialized nations, the United States has fallen to fifth in the percentage of young adults enrolled in college and has dropped to sixteenth in the proportion of those students…

The main goal of this report is to present evidence on the predictive validity of an English language arts (ELA) performance assessment (PA) administered in Grades 2-9 in a large urban school district. To account for the hierarchical structure of the data (students are nested within schools), we employed hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to…

This compendium of narrative and statistical information is an overview of the Oregon University System (OUS) and is produced every two years. The introduction includes a mission and vision statement, a listing of OUS campuses and centers, a history of the institutions, OUS degree partnership programs, and distance education degree programs, OUS…

As a nation, Kenya hopes to achieve Education for All (EFA) by the year 2015. This is an uphill task given the various challenges in the education sector. The year 2015 is also significant globally because it is the target year for the fulfillment of the eight-millennium goals. Kenya looks forward to have her people achieve the millennium goals…

High school dropout rates in many major urban settings in the United States have remained above 50% for more than three decades. This dropout crisis should now be considered evidence of an endemic lack of appreciation for formal education in city locales. United States federal policy initiatives have concentrated the nation on notions of teacher…

The purpose of this study was to examine persistence in school among students with Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) from the perspectives of the students themselves and their parents. Tinto's (1975, 1997) Student Integration Model (SIM) provided the theoretical framework for this research. This model involves an interplay between (1)…

As Harold Lasswell and his colleagues observed of the rhetoric of power (Language of Politics, 1965), some words become magic, with "inexplicable powers" attributed to them. "Access" has become such a word in the discourse of higher education. The sloganistic use of the term implies that someone, somewhere, is preventing somebody from doing…

The education of students is fundamental to shaping a preferred provincial, national and global future. It is also essential in maintaining Alberta's standard of living and ensuring its global competitiveness. The education system must simultaneously prepare the citizens of tomorrow while equipping the students with the knowledge and skills they…