Annual rankings provide easily consumable quantitative information that prospective students and their families use to make decisions about applications and admissions offers. One popular ranking is Princeton Review's Party Schools, which receives national attention and condemnation by institutional leaders. We analyzed IPEDS and Clery Act data…

In this article, we consider the extent to which a scholarship programme at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) engages with the challenges of transformation. This scholarship programme highlights the transformative potential of a programme that focuses on excellence for a previously under-represented group, but also demonstrates how this…

In this essay, the author analyzes two theoretical perspectives--incorporation and abjection--that inform official knowledge generally and high school American history textbooks specifically. While contemporary textbooks increasingly depict the experiences of historically marginalized groups such as women, African Americans, Latinos, American…

This paper is based on case-study research in four English secondary schools. It explores the pressure placed on English and mathematics departments because of their results being reported in annual performance tables. It examines how English and maths departments enact policies of achievement, the additional power and extra resources the pressure…

Researchers who examine the link between high school achievement and educational outcomes include measures of achievement that conflate high school effects with achievement effects established prior to high school. Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study, this article disaggregates achievement into achievement prior to high…

Drawing on experiences in his social studies classroom, Houman Harouni evaluates both the challenges and possibilities of helping high school students develop critical research skills. The author describes how he used Wikipedia to design classroom activities that address issues of authorship, neutrality, and reliability in information gathering.…

A study prolongs research on college choice by analyzing what African American students state about the importance of the college's athletic reputation when choosing which school to attend. Descriptive results indicate that roughly one out of every three African American respondents believe that a school's athletic reputation is at least a…

The annual US News and World Report (USNWR) Guide to America's Best Colleges is much anticipated by both high-ability high school seniors and college and university administrators. In this paper, we use a decade of Colgate University "Admitted Student Questionnaire" surveys to estimate the influence of changes in a school's USNWR rank on…

Over a decade has gone by since the report of the Widening Participation Committee--"Learning works"--was presented to the Further Education Funding Council. Ten years on, this report asks how far have we come in the decade since "Learning works"? What progress have we made? And what barriers have we yet to overcome? Bringing…

Using a longitudinal national database, the authors conducted a path analysis of girls' school delinquency to determine the indirect and direct effects of socioeconomic status, parental involvement, bonding to school, and girls' self-perception of reputation on school delinquency during middle school and high school. Self-perception of reputation…

Parents know adolescents can be cruel. They do not want their child rejected by peers. What is it like to be denigrated by one's middle school classmates? How common is a predatory anti-teacher peer culture in junior high school? Does it typically last into high school? How do peer norms of different crowds in a school get established? Who sets…

Over the past few years, games have gone from social pariahs to the darlings of the media, technology, and now educational industries. E-learning educators in particular stand to learn a lot about building next-generation learning environments from games. While online courses are usually little more than "online course notes," games offer entire…