'Asian whiz kids' perfect test scores.' 'Selective schools and tiger parents.' These types of headlines highlight the increased visibility of academically successful students from Asian migrant backgrounds, in Australia and other Western countries. They also point to anxiety about the perceived aggressive 'tiger' parenting often associated with…

Principals (policy makers) have debated the progress in U.S. student performance for a half century or more. Informing these conversations, survey agents have administered seven million psychometrically linked tests in math and reading in 160 waves to national probability samples of selected cohorts born between 1954 and 2007. This study is the…

The recently launched Australian Curriculum Health and Physical Education has five propositions, one of which is for students to adopt a critical inquiry approach within this subject area. In particular, students are encouraged to explore issues that relate to social power and taken-for-granted assumptions. This paper problematizes the concept of…

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) conducted the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), a multi-domain adult skills assessment with an extensive background questionnaire, in 2012. PIAAC is a global effort to understand how individuals' education, workplace experiences, and other…

It is often assumed that schools themselves play an important role in students not completing school. However, the literature is inconsistent on what school characteristics influence school leaving, and identified school effects may be spurious due to the absence, or poor measurement, of appropriate individual-level influences. The importance of…