This manual was written to help guide education stakeholders--including parents, students, school board members, community activists, administrators, policymakers and attorneys--in their efforts to promote racial diversity and avoid racial isolation in suburban school systems. Critical information on the current legal, political and policy issues…

The largest gains in graduation rates over the past decade have been accomplished at open-access or nearly open-access colleges and universities. In addition, states could see even bigger increases if they directed their policies and supports toward improving graduation rates at these nonselective institutions. These findings from the author's…

Throughput and retention are important issues in higher education in South Africa mainly due to the stronger emphasis on accountability from funding agencies like the Department of Education. This study, which is set in a distance education institution, was aimed at understanding why students cancel courses early on in the academic year. A…

Is it a myth that Advanced Placement (AP) is an adequate program for gifted students? AP is so covered with myths and assumptions that it is hard to get a clear view of the issues. In this article, the author finds the answer about AP by looking at current realties. First, AP is hard for gifted students to avoid. Second, AP never was a program…

This article examines Yale's "Awkward Squad" of "basic" writers between 1920 and 1960. Using archival materials that illustrate the socioeconomic conditions of this early, "pre-Shaughnessy" site of remedial writing instruction, I argue for a re-definition of "basic" in composition studies using local, institutional values rather than generic…

This article describes a private, open-enrollment school in Washington state's agricultural valley which typically serves first-generation college-goers who were actually discouraged from seeking higher education. Heritage University, a 1,346-student commuter university, serves a region and a population that other institutions have historically…

Over nearly three decades, the Public Policy Forum has collected and analyzed education data to report on the demographics, academic performance, and finances of public schools and districts in southeast Wisconsin. This 29th annual public schools report continues that tradition with updated analyses of new data and trends to shed light on the…

Immigrant youth and children of immigrants make up a large and increasing share of the nation's population, and over the next few decades they will constitute a significant portion of the U.S. workforce. Robert Teranishi, Carola Suarez-Orozco, and Marcelo Suarez-Orozco argue that increasing their educational attainment, economic productivity, and…

The research sought to objectively evaluate the effectiveness of Texas standard AP open-enrollment charter school campuses and to discover independent variables that may be utilized to predict effective charter school campuses. The data items used in the analyses were downloaded from the 2007-2008 Academic Excellence Indicator System (AEIS), which…

The University of the District of Columbia's problems are so deep and longstanding that some people thought it would take a rocket scientist to figure them out. So a year ago, its board of trustees appointed as president Dr. Allen Sessoms, the former Delaware State University president and Yale University-trained physicist who spent years sniffing…

One major concern with public school open enrollment programs is the potential for parents' school selection errors to adversely affect their children's academic achievement. In this study of the Beijing middle school open enrollment program, we estimate the degree to which children's school outcomes were negatively affected by the poor choices…

Student mobility is the phenomenon of students in grades K-12 changing schools for reasons other than customary promotion from elementary school to middle school or from middle school to high school. This non-promotional school change can occur during the school year or in the summer between school years. It may involve residential change, school…

The author describes the challenges of a four-year, open-admission institution where equality of access has not equaled equality of success for basic writers. While there is a good deal of scholarship on student departure by compositions and experts in student retention and persistence, some models of student departure and success offered by these…

Most discussions of charter schools assume that they are monolithic. While the media, researchers, and policymakers are obsessed with comparing charters to traditional public schools, there's been little interest in comparing different types of charter schools to one another--until now. This study--the first of its kind--categorizes the nation's…

The published prices on which the analysis in "Trends in College Pricing" is based come from data reported by institutions on the College Board's Annual Survey of Colleges. This survey, which is distributed to nearly 4,000 postsecondary institutions across the country, collects a wealth of data on enrollment, admission, degrees and…