This performance assessment pilot study was a major research component of the overall National Science Foundation funded Redesigned High Schools for Transformed STEM Learning Project. Secondary Earth/Environmental Science students' abilities to translate cognitive knowledge into demonstrable performance-based proficiencies were specifically…

We use data on statewide end-of-course tests in North Carolina to examine the relationship between teacher credentials and student achievement at the high school level. We find compelling evidence that teacher credentials, particularly licensure and certification, affects student achievement in systematic ways and that the magnitudes are large…

This examination of California's independent study high schools (alternative schools in which 75 percent or more of students in grades 9-12 are enrolled in full-time independent study) describes enrollment trends since 2001-02 and the number and characteristics of schools and students as well as teacher qualifications in 2006-07. The study used…

Astronomy was a required subject in the first American secondary level schools, the academies of the 18th century. When these were supplanted a century later by public high schools, astronomy still was often required, subsumed into courses of Natural Philosophy. Reasons given at that time to support astronomy as a part of general education include…

Recent studies of the relationship between teacher preparation pathways and student achievement have resulted in similar statistics but contradictory conclusions. These studies as a group have several limits: they sometimes focus on student-level indicators when many policy decisions are made with indicators at the school-level or above, are…

Richard Murnane observes that the American ideal of equality of educational opportunity has for years been more the rhetoric than the reality of the nation's political life. Children living in poverty, he notes, tend to be concentrated in low-performing schools staffed by ill-equipped teachers. They are likely to leave school without the skills…