As the national policy community has coalesced around the priority of graduating all students ready for college and careers, the challenge of improving the lowest-performing high schools serving the most challenged populations remains. This policy brief examines the limitations of previous high school reforms and describes new approaches showing…

"Student-Centered Schools: Closing the Opportunity Gap" documents the practices and outcomes of four urban high schools that, through student-centered approaches, are preparing their students for success in college, career, and life by providing them with the building blocks of knowledge and skills they will need as adults. The schools…

African American adolescents from families with low levels of human capital (i.e., caregiver level of education) are at risk for poor early adult outcomes. The current study examined the relationships among 48 African American high school students' literacy performance (e.g., reading and vocabulary), their implicit views of intelligence, their…

Every school day, more than seven thousand students become dropouts. Annually, that adds up to about 1.3 million students who will not graduate from high school with their peers as scheduled. Lacking a high school diploma, these individuals will be far more likely than graduates to spend their lives periodically unemployed, on government…

The Apollo 20 project was launched during the 2010-2011 school year to accelerate Houston Independent School District's (HISD's) efforts to improve student performance in every school and close the achievement gap districtwide. This partnership with EdLabs at Harvard University incorporates best practices from successful public and charter schools…

Georgia's legislators have approved a plan whereby public school districts in the state could convert to charter schools to tailor programs for local educational communities. The state has authorized funds for five secondary-level charter career academies that are to be positioned regionally and partnered with a postsecondary community or…

Excelencia in Education is committed to using data to inform public policy and institutional practice to achieve our mission of accelerating student success for Latinos in higher education. Every educational experience from early childhood to high school and into the workforce influences the potential for college success. For this reason, this…

While "ability" has long featured prominently in economic models and empirical studies of labor markets, economists have only recently begun to consider how personality and attitudes--noncognitive factors--influence behavior both from a theoretical and empirical standpoint. This dissertation incorporates noncognitive factors into…

It is intuitive for businesses and corporations to be worried about the nation's economic competitiveness in the globalized marketplace. To help close this income-based degree attainment gap, models of college access and success programs continue to emerge among the corporate sector. For years, many corporations have established internship and/or…

The racial achievement gap in education is an important social problem to which decades of research have yielded no scalable solutions. Recent evidence from "No Excuses" charter schools--which demonstrates that some combination of school inputs can educate the poorest minority children--offers a guiding light. In the 2010-2011 school…

This dissertation focuses on a key challenge facing developing countries intent on enhancing their human capital base--namely, the issue of quality. One of the chapters evaluates the effectiveness of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) initiative in Nepal's primary and lower-secondary schools. Although the OLPC program is being heavily promoted in…

Maintaining a competitive edge within the 21st century is dependent on the cultivation of human capital, producing qualified and innovative employees capable of competing within the new global marketplace. Technological advancements in communications technology as well as large scale, infrastructure development has led to a leveled playing field…

This study examined the student and high school contextual factors associated with high school students' enrollment in Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs). The authors drew on a conceptual framework of college choice involving the concepts of multiple capitals and individual and organizational habitus to examine the postsecondary trajectories of…

Given the severity of the high school crisis, the national imperative to graduate all students ready for college and careers, and the current momentum to achieve significant changes in education policy, federal policy-makers should make it a priority to reauthorize Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) now. It is critically important that…

In an effort to better understand the various economic benefits that a particular urban area could expect were it to reduce its number of high school dropouts, the Alliance for Excellent Education, with the generous support of State Farm[R], has developed a sophisticated economic model in partnership with Economic Modeling Specialists Inc. The…